A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Spoken English Reformulation Markers

Reformulation marker is an item belonging to the category of discourse markers, but the research on reformulation markers is much less than that of discourse markers. This is a corpus-based comparative study on English reformulation markers (RMs) in spoken texts. By using the data from two spoken corpora, which are one learner corpus (SECCL) and one reference corpus (MICASE), a thorough examination on RMs has been made. With corpus evidence as the powerful foundation, the present study has explored syntactic properties, semantic properties and pragmatic properties as well as some similarities and differences on the use of RMs by Chinese English majors and American native students.Based on Relevance Theory and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis, some major findings have been made after the exploration. On the whole, Chinese English majors underuse the selected six RMs in their spoken English compared with native students (p<0.01). Through a deep exploration on syntactic properties of RMs, the data shows that Chinese English majors and native speakers tend to use that is to say, such as and I mean almost equally in the segments of one utterance. But they tend to use for example, for instance and well in different positions. By a thorough examination on semantic properties of RMs, an obvious finding is that Chinese English majors and American native speakers can almost use RMs in the same way on semantic scale. Pragmatic functions are discussed as the common properties of RMs, and some examples are selected from these two corpora to make an exemplification. At last, this study has also slightly analyzed the possible reasons for these differences. And some suggestions for the further study have been proposed.