Discourse Markers Use In Korean Learners Of Chinese: An Investigation And Error Analysis

Based on Relevance Theory, Discourse Markers is within the scope of discourse analysis, though many scholars have conducted their researches from the view of pragmatics. DMs mainly function in oral communication. From the point of listeners, they usually need pragmatic reasoning to accomplish a communication, using discourse markers which have no or little propositional meaning. They do not constitute a separate syntactic category, but they encode procedural constraints on the understanding of utterances. DMs indicate the purpose of the speaker and alleviate the listener's endeavors when dealing with discourse to avoid misunderstanding. Therefore, DMs are more of dynamic pragmatic features and emotional functions. Through the research of DMs, scholars home and abroad are mainly focusing on the studies of native languages, while the research on contrastive studies from the view of cross-culture and inter-language is nearly blank.From the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, this paper is based on the Speech Act Theory by Austin and Grammaticalization Theory by Traugott. According to the coherent functions of DMs, using the natural speaking materials collected from classes and questionnaires,personal interviews and discourse completion test as the methods, the author analyzes DMs used by Korean learners of Chinese at intermediate level in their oral Chinese. This paper has made some endeavours in the following aspects. Firstly,it studies DMs from the perspective of inter-language. Secondly, it completely defines and specificly categorizes DMs. Thirdly, adopting both qualitative and quantitative analysis as its research methods, it gives statistics and error analysis. Fourthly, it analyzes the superficial and underlying causes and discusses teaching strategies based on error analysis. Through one-year study, the author has come to the conclusion that students who have stronger inter-language abilities made fewer pragmatic errors and had no fossilization phenomenon. Meanwhile, pragmatic errors can also reflect students'superficial understanding of the DMs which result in their use of different communicative strategies to avoid errors. Besides, the gender of the learners and their Chinese proficiency can also influence their use of DMs.Hopefully, this paper can enrich the study of DMs from the perspective of inter-language, and can be of some practical value in the area of TCFL.