A Corpus-based Study Of The Use Of Discourse Marker I Think By Chinese EFL Learners

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, showing that discourse markers can assume various pragmatic functions. This dissertation is based on two corpora: London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English (LLC) and College Learners'Spoken English Corpus (COLSEC). It makes a comparative study of the use of discourse marker I think in these two kinds of corpora from the perspectives of the overall frequencies, collocations, positions, and especially pragmatic functions. The dissertation aims to explore the similarities and differences in the use of I think between Chinese EFL learner and native speakers. It also aims to find out possible improvements that could be made for Chinese English learners in using I think. Adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods, this dissertation focuses on investigating the pragmatic functions of I think in two corpora. Native speakers mainly employ I think for turn-taking/holding or mitigating, while Chinese EFL learners may use I think for some other functions as well, such as upgrader, interrupting, self-repair and reformulation, listing, reasoning/illustrating, summarizing, etc. The writer tries to analyze the possible reasons underlying such misuses from the perspectives of pragmatic transfer, pragmatic overgeneralization and situational anxiety, which may provide some constructive pedagogical implications.