Chinese Discourse Markers

Masses of fundamental concepts and theories on systematical functional grammar and speech act theory are utilized in this dissertation to probe into metadiscourse markers (MMs) in modern Chinese. In language communication, two levels or planes of discourse are involved: the primary discourse level which consists of propositions and referential meanings, and the metadiscourse level which consists of propositional attitudes, textual meanings, and interpersonal meaning. Metadiscourse markers that can be observed in both speech and writing texts, have many rhetorical function, including discourse organizational function, supervisory function, evaluative function, and interactional function. Text can be seen as rhetorical product, and metadiscourse markers are the traces that speakers left over. So the study of metadiscourse markers can offer a new perspective for the study of textual interaction and textual rhetoric.The essay includes seven chapters with more than 180,000 characters in total.In chapter one, the introduction consists in the objects for examining, the significance of the research, the range of argument, the approach of analyzing, the background of related theories and the explanation of the corpora's origin.Chapter two defines metadiscourse, considering that the study of MMs is an important part of the study of textual rhetoric. This part discusses the relationship between primary discourse and metadiscourse, the distinction of metadiscourse and parentheses, syntactic modality. The last part of this chapter is to review and integrate related literature and studies on MMs in order to find an appropriate typology for my study.Chapter three examines the formal feature and functional categories of MMs, discussing the relationship between metadiscourse and MMs, analyzing the structural types of MMs, and providing functional standards for categorizing MM, and putting forward the types of MMs.Chapter four studies textual MMs, which includs topical structural MMs, connective MMs, evidential MMs, and explanative MMs. Textual MMs help speakers to manage the informational flow to explicitly establish his or her preferred interpretations. They are concerned with ways of organizing discourse to anticipate readers' knowledge and reflect the writer's assessment of what needs to be made explicit to constrain and guide what can be recovered from the text.Chapter five examines interpersonal MMs, which includs hedges, boosters, attitude markers and engagement markers. Interpersonal MMs focus on the participants of the interaction and seek to display the writer's persona and a tenor consistent with the norms of the disciplinary community, concerning the writer's efforts to control the level of personality in a text and establish a suitable relationship to his or her data, arguments, and audience, marking the degree of intimacy, the expression of attitude, the communication of commitments, and the extent of reader involvement.The sixth chapter studies the relationship between MMs and stylistic feature, taking a dynamic perspective to study style, with the second section of this chapter analyzing the usages of MMs in report text and comment text of news style, the third comparing the different usage of three Chinese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the fourth analyzing the usage of MMs in three kinds of modern Chinese text , the fifth comparing the usage of MMs in three disciplines academic text and The sixth discussing the interactional rehtorical model, including the establishment of self-identity of speaker/writer, the expectation to reader/hearer, and the intertextuality interaction.Chapter seven, which is the conclusion, summarizes the main ideas of thesis, and points out some further topics to be discussed.