A Coherence Theory Based Study Of "Now" And "Then" As Discourse Markers

According to many previous studies, discourse markers are not impracticallanguage accessories; instead, they have some critical roles in communication. In thelanguage text, there are three main functions of discourse markers including thesubjective function, the interactional function and the action function.Considering that the studies of discourse markers based on the coherence theoryare insufficient and there is a lack of the studies on “now” and “then” as discoursemarkers, the thesis takes these two words as the study focus by observing thefrequencies, analyzing the distributions and discussing the roles of discourse markersin realizing the marker functions. It is hoped that the study can help to fill in the gapin the study of discourse markers in China and can enhance the teachers’ awareness ofdiscourse markers so as to raise their oral english teaching levels.Based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this thesiscollects500cases of “now” and500cases of “then” and extracts the standard objects.It employs the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis methods to analyze theresults of research questions. And it adopts Schiffrin’s theory framework to discussthe study results. After analyzing and discussing the results, it is found that as adiscourse marker,“now” plays an important role in expressing subjective attitudestowards disputable conversations, and it is a D-signal in realizing the interactionalfunction as well as a marker to mark different developments of topics or topicturnings. As for “then”, in the subjective function, it marks the successive attitudes to the previous topics; in the interactional function, it is an A-signal which marks theconfirmation to the prior topics; and in the textual function, it is used to attract thehearer’s attention to the upcoming topics.