A Survey Of The Use Of Contrastive Discourse Markers In Writings By Chinese English Majors

Discourse markers are in general use everyday and everywhere. They seem to be redundant and of trifling importance. A discourse with omitted discourse markers has no syntactic and semantic consequences. However, they are indispensible and irreplaceable to a successful communication. A wealth of researches on discourse markers has turned into a growth industry. The cultivation of a proper use of discourse markers is the reflection of one's language proficiency in writing. Contrastive discourse markers (henceforth, CDMs) are one of the typical groups with its unique characteristics,in which many problems exit in Chinese English majors'written work. A correct understanding and proper use of CDMs s constitutes and important aspect of one's pragmatic competence. Although the study of CDMs is not less, corpus-based contrastive survey of a comprehensive range of their performance in Chinese English majors'written work is relatively limited.In the framework of interlanguage pragmatics and with the brand-new methodological advantages, provided by learner corpora and retrieval software, this thesis intends to carry out a contrastive study to reveal the actual performance of twenty collected CDMs by Chinese English Majors in CLEC based on the comparison of natives'in BNC 40. The instruments of AntConc 3.2.1, BNC Indexer, and SPSS 16.0 play an important part in uncovering quantitatively the overall feature and individual characteristics of non-nativeness hidden behind overused, underused and misused items.The corpus-based contrastive analysis offers a broader and wider-angled corpus account for this thesis. The overall and individual performance of CDMs can be obtained respectively. The conclusion can be reached that no significant overall difference between these two corpora exists but a striking contrastive difference for each matched CDM does occur, although the most and least frequent individual CDMs are happen to be identical. The overall frequency of CDMs used by Chinese English majors is even more than the total number used by native speakers, which means the students actually have the awareness of using CDMs to add to the coherence of their written work. Meanwhile, no significant difference is found between these two groups in terms of their placement, but a striking difference does exist among these CDMs in terms of their initial, medial or final positions. Anyway, Chinese English majors are less flexible than natives, and they intend to use some common and high-frequent CDMs rather than some complex and low-frequent ones. The underused, overused and misuses indicate their lack of pragmatic competence in writing.The purpose of language research is for a better guidance to teaching and learning practice. Findings compared to native speakers'aim to get a suggestive picture of how these non-native speakers perform. The findings may provide information and guidelines for future teaching and offering some pedagogical considerations. The traditional discourse-teaching model should be broke and future teaching should be improved based on the findings obtained in this study, contrastive rhetoric and modern discourse analysis method, so that the students'writing ability will be promoted.