A Corpus-Based Study Of Discourse Markers: An Investigation Of So

Discourse markers are one of the common language phenomena in discourse interpretation, which results in the understanding of an utterance or constrains the comprehension of a discourse. Linguists in particular pragmatic linguists make an extensive research on discourse markers, and as a result discourse markers are considered as one of the most significant study projects in pragmatics. Gradually scholars have made great efforts in terms of academic development. What manners does a speaker employ to lead the hearer to the related contextual effects in Chinese and English respectively? Recently more and more scholars tend to suppose that discourse markers achieve pragmatic and dynamic functions. This dissertation is on the basis of two corpora: British National Corpus (BNC) and Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). This dissertation makes a comparison in terms of so between two kinds of corpora BNC and CLEC which analyses the three different cases concerning various positions when the word so occurs in the sentence. The dissertation aims to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese English Learner Corpus and British National Corpus when speakers make use of discourse markers so in communication. It also aims to find out the improvements that could be made for Chinese English learners as well.