| Discourse Markers(DMs)are a common discourse phenomenon in verbal communication.They often drift away from the grammatical structure and are not restricted by the grammatical structure.Even deleted from the discourse,they do not affect the integrity and grammaticality of the discourse as well.They mainly play a pragmatic role in the discourse,and usually express the speaker's attitude and evaluation in communication.The study of DMs has been a hot topic in the field of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics in recent years.DMs have attracted the attention of foreign scholars at first,while they are also frequently used in Chinese.A thorough and systematic study of them will help to further discover and master more disciplines of language development and thus achieve more successful verbal communication.Therefore,the contrastive study of DMs in English and Chinese business news has important theoretical value and practical significance.This thesis chooses the business news from The Wall Street Journal and Economic Daily from July 13 to October 2,2018 as the corpus,and it builds English and Chinese corpora.Based on the classification of Wang Lifei and Zhu Weihua(2005),the frequency of all DMs in the corpora is obtained.Under the guidance of Relevance Theory,it also discusses the pragmatic functions of the most representative DMs which are selected both from the English and Chinese corpora.Thus,it can get the characteristics of DMs in English and Chinese business news,as well as the similarities and differences of their pragmatic functions.Based on the Relevance Theory,and through the contrastive analysis of these two corpora,the following conclusions are drawn:Firstly,this thesis finds that there are many similarities in the frequency of DMs used in English and Chinese business news.For example,the frequency of fillers in two corpora is very low,contrastive DMs are highly-used in both corpora,and the use of causal DMs has the same number and so on.However,there are also some differences in the frequency of their use.Some DMs are frequently used in English corpus,but rarely used in Chinese,such as eligible DMs,and it has the same situation in Chinese.In addition,after a contrastive analysis of the pragmatic functions of the typical DMs,it is found that they also have some similarities and differences.The similarities are embodied in the functions of discourse construction,interpersonal interaction,textual constriction and ostension.The differences lie in the situationality,and the same type of DMs appear as distinct pragmatic functions in English and Chinese these two different discourses and contexts. |
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