| In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the exploration of discourse markers focusing on their definition, meaning and function. The booming of this research area is not only manifested by the majority of literature on this phenomenon in different languages but also from various theoretical perspectives.The present study focuses on the functions of discourse markers in fictional discourse, and the discussion is set against the background of comparative studies between English and Chinese. There are lots of differences and similarities between English and Chinese discourse markers in syntax, morphology and lexical meaning. From the perspective of the functions of discourse markers, the differences and similarities between the two languages can be elaborated clearly. With certain exceptions, discourse markers signal the relationship between the segments they introduce, S2, and the prior segment, S1. The core meaning of a discourse marker consists in its procedural meaning rather than the conceptual meaning and its specific interpretation is "negotiated" with reference to the context.The overall aim of the present study is to analyze the similarities and differences of the functions of English and Chinese discourse markers in fictional discourse, and to evaluate their contributions to the interpretation of the development of fictional discourse. In order to reach the aim, this study firstly draws on the data taken from the following corpora:English data are from COCA and Chinese data are from CCL Corpus. To ensure the comparability, the data for analysis in this study are collected from English and Chinese fictional discourse, so as to control the variance resulting from different genres. In order to obtain the frequencies and distributions of different kinds of discourse markers, the corpus concordance program WordSmith Tools 4.0 is applied to extract the relevant data.In this study, three groups of discourse markers are chosen from COCA and CCL Corpus for case study, which are respectively contrastive discourse markers but in English and dan shi in Chinese; elaborative discourse markers you know, I mean in English and ni zhi dao in Chinese; and inferential discourse markers so in English and suo yi in Chinese. Based on the theoretical foundations of speech act theory and relevance theory, this research establishes an integrated framework to analyze the discourse markers in a detailed and systematic way.One of the most important functions of discourse markers is their role in discourse structuring, which is connective in nature. The major findings of the research firstly indicate that the propositional function of discourse markers is manifested only on the content level. Secondly, one of the contributions of discourse markers to discourse is on the discourse-semantic and information structural level. Thirdly, the distribution of discourse-marking expressions reveals certain regularity which any model of the semantics/pragmatics interfaces should take account of. Fourthly, discourse markers are more pervasive in English fictional discourse than in Chinese one, which corresponds with the hypotaxis features of English and parataxis characteristics of Chinese. In addition, in terms of the relevance-theoretic framework, the hearer is manipulated in the process of searching for relevance. The hearer processes each new item of information in the context that yields a maximum contextual effect at the minimum cost in searching for relevance.This study gains insight into the nature of discourse markers based on the comparative study of English and Chinese fictional discourse. In view of the lack of comparison of discourse markers in English and Chinese fictional discourse, this study is an attempt to fill the gap by conducting a corpus-based analysis. Therefore, this study not only adds valuable analysis to the literature of discourse markers, but also provides an analytical framework for the comparative study of discourse markers characteristic in English and Chinese fictional discourse.
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