The Use Of Discourse Markers In English Writing Of Non-English-major Postgraduates

Discourse markers are one of the common language phenomena, which function in constraining the coherence and cohesion of comprehension and interpretation of a discourse. This thesis aims to make a contrastive study between non-English-major postgraduates and native speakers in use of discourse markers in English writing on the basis of corpus linguistics.The author firstly constructed a self-built corpus which called Non-English-major Postgraduates Composition Corpus. This corpus has two sub-corpora---high-score corpus and low-score corpus. Then the thesis use a powerful corpus processing tool Wordsmith Tools to make quantitative analysis and contrastive study based on the Non-English-major Postgraduates Composition Corpus and the native speakers'corpus---BAWE corpus, furthermore, the discourse markers are studied based on the classification of Wang Lifei and Zhu Weihua. The results show that there are some slight differences between high-score corpus, low-score corpus and BAWE corpus. The total frequency in the use of discourse markers by Chinese postgraduates is a little higher than that by native speakers and the total frequency in the use of discourse markers of high-score corpus is higher than that in low-score corpus, but there is no prominent differences in selecting the special discourse markers between Chinese postgraduates and native speakers. These results give some pedagogical implications to the future research: firstly the English teachers should call students'attention on the correct and proper use of discourse markers; secondly the English teachers should adopt corpus linguistics into practical teaching processes and give the students opportunity to know more natural and authentic data of target language.There are five chapters in this thesis: chapter one is introduction which makes a brief introduction of discourse markers and raise the main research questions; chapter two is the literature review which gives the general review of definitions, classifications of discourse makers; chapter three is about the methodologies which are used in this study, including interlanguage and contrastive study, then it introduces the detailed procedures of data collection and data analysis; chapter four is to discuss the results from the data analysis and the reasons caused these results; chapter four is a conclusion of whole sections, it includes the pedagogical implication to English writing teaching and learning, the limitations of the study and suggestions to the further research.