A Study Of Reformulation Markers In Chinese And North American Applied Linguistics MA Theses

Reformulation markers(RMs)are critical pragmatic phenomena in linguistic communication,and they are often used as discourse markers(DMs).Most of the previous studies on RMs greatly emphasize paraphrastic RMs and mainly focus on the field of spoken language.As for RMs’ studies about writing,the majority of researchers use Del Saz’s theory to probe the lexical,syntactic and semantic features of Chinese college students’ time-limited writing in English.Non-paraphrastic RMs have not been paid much attention to,and there are few studies on them.To identify the systematic features of RMs used by Chinese EFL learners more specifically Chinese postgraduates majoring in Applied Linguistics,this thesis is different from previous studies,putting forward a new analytical framework based upon the theories of Cuenca and Bach to analyze the similarities and differences in the use of RMs in comparison with English native speakers from the perspective of forms and functions.Possible reasons for these differences are also revealed in this thesis.To achieve these purposes,this thesis uses the Chinese Learner Corpus(CLC)and the Native Speaker Corpus(NSC)built by Northeastern Normal University.This thesis attempts to answer the three research questions as follows:(1)What are the similarities and differences of reformulation markers used by Chinese EFL learners compared with their native counterparts in terms of forms and functions?(2)What are the distribution features of reformulation markers used by Chinese EFL learners compared with their native counterparts in terms of overuse,underuse and misuse?(3)What are the causes of these differences in the use of reformulation markers between Chinese EFL learners and their native counterparts?The data analysis shows that:(1)In terms of forms,most of RMs used by Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers are simple markers,and it is evident that Chinese EFL learners tend to use more RMs both in simple forms and complex forms compared with their native counterparts.In terms of functions,the most frequently used RMs are expansion RMs,which overwhelm the other three kinds of RMs both in CLC and NSC.Moreover,the least frequently used type of RMs are permutation RMs.In the two corpora,the majority of RMs are found in the initial position,less in the medial position,and the occurrences of RMs in the final position of sentences are the least even no.(2)There are overuse,underuse and misuse of RMs in CLC by Chinese EFL learners compared with their native counterparts.The most significant overused RM by Chinese EFL learners is that is to say.Besides,RMs including in a word,to sum up,namely and that is are also overused in CLC to some extent,and the most significant underused RM in CLC is e.g..Generally speaking,in terms of RMs in CLC,there are seven main types of misuse in total.(3)Chinese EFL learners use RMs with a tendency of colloquialism,which affects the validity and objectivity of academic writing.Besides,due to the influence of language transfer,expressing ability,avoidance strategy,personal preference as well as nuances in semantics and style of RMs,Chinese EFL learners demonstrate some unique features while using RMs in academic writing.The research significance and practical implications of the present study are as follows.Firstly,this thesis is helpful to a deeper study of academic writing and RMs,especially non-paraphrastic RMs in China.Secondly,this thesis studies the features of RMs used in Chinese EFL learners’ master theses,which is conducive to promoting the objectivity and authenticity of language expression in college students’ academic writing.Thirdly,this thesis has some referential significance in second language acquisition(SLA)and teaching,which has some implications for L2 academic writing pedagogy.