A Study On Textual Functions Of Discourse Markers

Discourse Markers are one of the common language phenomena in discourse analysis, which refer to the grammatical words and phrases we often use to indicate pauses, transition, reason or other aspects of communication.The study on Discourse Markers has attracted more attention and become a focus in linguistic study since the publications of Discourse Markers by Schiffrin in 1987 and Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. Interest in discourse markers study has increased commensurately along with the growing interest in the production and comprehension of extended discourse, and more generally, in pragmatic and contextual aspects of utterance interpretation. This growing interest has drawn increasing attention to those elements of linguistic structure that appear to be most directly involved in the relation of separate utterance.A good command of using Discourse Markers may help us to facilitate communication and achieve cohesive devices.Linguists, especially pragmatic linguists, have made an extensive research on Discourse Markers. However, few researches focus on textual perspective. This thesis is intended to explore the textual functions of Discourse Markers based on vast areas of materials and the theory of meta-functions by Halliday.This thesis mainly expounds the definitions, classifications and other approaches to discourse markers abroad and at home. Then, discourse markers are applied to listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation in EFL teaching. A large number of English examples are analyzed in the thesis according to Halliday's meta-functions, especially textual functions.By a great number of data-analysis, the thesis demonstrates six textual functions and the direct instructive meaning for EFL teaching. The six textual functions are: the function of the function of topic-introducing and closing, the function of focus-foregrounding, the functions of cohesion and coherence, the function of constraining, the Function of Predicting and the function of encapsulating. Such study is a beneficial complement to traditional teaching methods which only focus on the strata of words and clauses. Thus, the present study can be employed to make deeper analysis and better interpretation of discourse and can be used to instruct listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation courses of EFL teaching on the textual stratum, which may highly motivated the efficiency of EFL learners.