A Corpus-based COmparative Study On The Use Of Discourse Marker I Think

The analysis of discourse markers (hereafter DMs, and DM for discourse marker) has drawn worldwide attention due to its frequent appearance in daily communication. Linguists who devoted themselves to the study of DMs have reached a general agreement that DMs function pragmatically and have an important role to play in discourse coherence and utterance interpretation.Rich in pragmatic functions, DM I think is commonly used in verbal communications. Speakers can express their different ideas under different contexts by employing I think so as to achieve their purpose of communication. This paper is based on two corpora: Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learner (SECCL) and Corpus of Friends (CF). It makes a comparative study of the use of DM I think between native speakers and Chinese EFL learners in terms of its frequency and collocation. By adopting both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this paper focuses on the investigation of the pragmatic functions of DM I think in both corpora. Native speakers mainly use DM I think to fulfill the functions of taking the turn, holding the turn and showing politeness. For Chinese EFL learners, besides using DM I think to realize the above functions, they also employ it to emphasize'I am expressing my opinion'and signal self-repair and reformulation, etc.In addition, the writer probes into the underlying reasons for Chinese EFL learners'inappropriate use of DM I think from the perspectives of pragmatic transfer, pragmatic fossilization, situational anxiety and little instructions in DMs with the aim of raising Chinese EFL learners'awareness of the use of DMs so as to enhance their language proficiency in second language acquisition.