A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of The Function Of Discourse Marker Anyway Between Chinese EFL Learners And Native English Speakers

Discourse marker,which plays an important role in human communication,is receiving an increasing amount of attention in linguistics,especially in pragmatics.While it has been neglected by Chinese EFL learners for a long time in their study.And compared with discourse markers like well,you know,I mean,and etc.,which have been investigated a lot,little attention is given to discourse markers anyway.The current study primarily focuses on the comparison of the function of discourse marker anyway between Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers from perspective of its pragmatic functions,syntactic positions and collocations.Based on the Relevance Theory,this thesis explores the function of discourse marker anyway of Chinese EFL learners.The study chooses two corpora as the data sources: The Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SECCL)and The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English(SBCSAE).The current study classifies the pragmatic functions of discourse marker anyway into six sorts,namely,anyway as a topic change marker,an elaborative marker,a contrastive marker,an inferential maker,a resumptive marker and a closing marker.The syntactic positions of discourse marker anyway in this study are divided into the initial position,the medial position and the final position.Meanwhile,the author compared the top five collocations of discourse marker anyway in these two corpora.With the help of WordSmith tools 4.0,the frequencies of discourse marker anyway in these two corpora can be searched out.Then,the author made different tags of each anyway in the original text according to the classifications of its pragmatic functions and syntactic positions.The software SPSS 21.0 is also used to analyze whether there is a significant difference in the use of discourse marker anyway between Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers.Finally,a comprehensive comparison of discourse marker anyway used by Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers is given.Major findings from the present study revealed that(1)As for the frequency of discourse marker anyway,Chinese EFL learners use discourse marker anyway not so frequently as English native speakers do.(2)As for the pragmatic functions of discourse marker anyway,Chinese EFL learners usually use discourse marker anyway as an inferential marker and a closing marker,while English native speakers frequently use discourse marker anyway as a resumptive marker and an elaborative marker.(3)As for the syntactic positions of discourse marker anyway,both Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers are inclined to use discourse marker anyway in the medial position,and sometimes use it in the initial position.While English native speakers more frequently put discourse marker anyway in the final position thanChinese EFL learners do.In addition,when discourse marker anyway is put in the initial or the medial position,Chinese EFL learners use it as an inferential marker,while English native speakers tend to use it as a resumptive marker;and when discourse marker anyway is used in the final position,Chinese EFL learners always use it as a closing marker,while English native speakers use it as an elaborative marker.(4)As for the collocations of discourse marker anyway,Chinese EFL learners use more collocations of discourse marker anyway than English native speakers do.In a word,compared with English native speakers,Chinese EFL learners have not well mastered the use of discourse marker anyway from perspective of its pragmatic functions,syntactic positions and collocations.