A Comparative Study Of You Know Used By Chinese EFL Learners And American Native Speakers Of English From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

DM(Discourse Marker)is a common phenomenon in verbal communication,which contributes nothing to propositional content of the utterances but helps hearers to construct a relevant contextual assumption and guides hearers to understand the utterances and constrains the interpretation.With the development of pragmatics,many overseas and domestic scholars pay more attention to DMs from diverse perspectives.Recently,You know has attracted most attention of many scholars.This thesis conducts a comparative research about you know based on two corpora with text analysis of corpus and quantitative and qualitative analysis under Relevance Theory.By analyzing the similarities and differences about the application of pragmatic functions and syntactic positions of you know between Chinese EFL learners and American native speakers of English,this thesis explores three reasons for the differences and provides some possible pedagogical suggestions for English teaching according to the reasons.The measures are mainly from three aspects: adding supplementary materials,English teachers’ instructions and activities as well as establishing natural language environment for students so that Chinese EFL learners could be fully aware of the pragmatic functions of DMs and improve their communicative skills in verbal communication.The data are selected from two corpora: Corpus of Contemporary American English and Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners.With the help of concordance program Antconc and statistical analysis tool SPSS,all the data with you know will be manually retrieved,tagged,and categorized.Then,this thesis makes a comparative analysis between Chinese EFL learners and American native speakers of English according to the four pragmatic functions and three syntactic positions of you know,and gives the results:Firstly,Chinese EFL learners use you know less frequently and flexibly than American speakers of English.In terms of the pragmatic functions,both Chinese EFL learners and American native speakers of English can employ four pragmatic functions of you know,but Chinese EFL learners underuse you know as an addition marker,delay marker and mitigation marker in verbal communication,which means they are not fully aware of the importance of pragmatic functions of you know in verbal communication.Secondly,in terms of the syntactic positions,both Chinese EFL learners and American native speakers of English use you know in medial position,sometimes in initial position and rarely in final position.However,Chinese learners are not aware that syntactic positions stand for different pragmatic functions.Later,this thesis analyzes the three possible reasons for above differences: negative transfer of L1,pragmatic fossilization and insufficient L2 input and output respectively.Finally,this thesis presents the limitation of this thesis,and put forward some accessible suggestions for future researches.