Influence Of The Analytical Ability Of Discourse Markers On Consecutive Interpretation

In recent years, the study on discourse markers (DMs) by pragmatics linguists is on the rise.DMs, as a common linguistic phenomenon, are also an area worth studying for interpretationstrainees and researchers, who deal with the "language in use". Even though interpretation theoristsdo not give such a well-defined concept as "discourse markers", they have elaborated theimportance of so-called "links" in each phase of consecutive interpretation (CI) task. As such, thisthesis makes an initial effort to study the influence of DMs analytical ability (DAA) on CIperformance on the basis of the enlarged concept of DMs, through an empirical study.Chapter Two reviews relevant literature on DMs and CI, especially literature about thedefinition, functions, categorization of DMs, DMs analysis from the perspective of discourseanalysis, and the importance of "links" at three stages of CI task (including listening and analysis,note-taking and reproduction), so as to verify the rationality and relevance of the study on theinfluence of DAA on CI performance.Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the empirical study and results analysis. Five first-yeargraduate students and four second-year graduate students from the "Sino-EU Senior InterpretersTraining Center" in the University of International Business and Economics participated in theexperiment as subjects. The experiment results, including interpretation tape-recording, notestaken down during the experiment, and questionnaires, show that there is a direct relationshipbetween DAA and CI performance among first-year students;second-year students' DAA and CIperformance are much better than those of first-years, but there is no direct link between DAA andtheir corresponding CI performance.The author holds that it is worthwhile studying the influence of DAA on interpretation, andwelcomes suggestions and comments from experts of all circles to help deepen this study.