An Across-register Study Of Discourse Markers Based On COCA

Discourse marker is a common language phenomenon in everyday communication and writings.It makes discourses coherent by constructing the relationships between sentences.Many researches at home and abroad have made exhaustive analysis of discourse markers within a certain register,but the research results in different registers are inconsistent.The inconsistence may originate from the fact that previous researchers focus on analyzing the characteristics of discourse markers in a certain register but neglect the potential influence of register on discourse markers.Therefore,it is assumed that the relationship between registers and discourse markers should be studied from a broader perspective.By comparing the use of discourse markers in different registers,this study explores whether the change of register influences the use of discourse markers and how register influences the use of discourse markers.This corpus-based research adopts the COCA to retrieve the frequencies of discourse markers used in the blog,fiction,newspaper,and academic registers.With the aid of Microsoft Excel,the ratio and normalized frequency of individual discourse marker is calculated.Finally,by means of Chi-square and Log-Likelihood Calculator 1.0,the frequencies of discourse markers in four registers are compared by Chi-square tests to figure out whether there are significant differences between them.With the frequencies,ratios,normalized frequencies,and P-values of discourse markers,this research explores whether register changes influence the use of discourse markers in terms of type,frequency,distribution,form,and syntactic position.After further discussing the research data based on register theory,this study found that:(1)The change of register has a significant influence on the variety of discourse markers at the overall and category levels,which is mainly caused by the fact that the tenor and mood influence the formality of language and the register with high formality requires low variety of discourse markers;(2)The change of register has a significant influence on the density of discourse markers at the overall and category levels.The main reason is that the field influences the information-intensity of register,and the register with high informationintensity requires more discourse markers to guide reading;(3)The change of register has a significant influence on the distribution of discourse markers.Contrastive markers are used mostly in the academic and newspaper registers while elaborative markers are used mostly in the blog and fiction registers,which is caused by the differences in the main communicative objectives of different fields.(4)The change of register does not significantly influence the forms of discourse markers at the overall level.Discourse markers belonging to conjunctions are most frequently used in four registers because discourse markers belonging to conjunctions(and,but,so)are the primary discourse markers that have the broadest meaning.At the category level,register changes influence the forms of discourse markers to some extent.Elaborative,inferential,and topic-change markers belonging to adverbs are mostly used in the academic register while discourse markers belonging to conjunctions are mostly used in other three registers.The main reason is that the academic register has a high requirement for keeping language objective and avoiding duplication.(5)The change of register has no significant influence on the syntactic positions of discourse markers,and the discourse markers in the middle position are more than those in the initial position.It indicates that the participants in four registers aim to point readers to the content and constrain reader’ excessive interpretations for writers through putting discourse markers in the middle position.Theoretically,through applying register theory to study the influence of register on discourse markers,this study broadens the scope of the application of register theory.Besides,this study enriches the research perspectives of discourse markers by introducing the dimension of “register” into the research system of discourse markers.Practically,this study presents suggestions for teaching English discourse markers in different English classes and provides references for machine translation and human-computer interaction systems to design the density parameters,variety parameters,and sensitivity parameters of discourse markers belonging to different registers.