The Use Of Causal Discourse Markers In Chinese Non-Eenglish Major College Students' Argumentative Writings

DMs (discourse markers) are a class of lexical expressions drawn primarily from the syntactic classes of conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositional phrase, signaling a relationship between the interpretation of the segment they introduce, S2, and the prior segment, S1. (Fraser, 1999) Under Coherence Theory, they are regarded cohesive devices, contributing a lot to the cohesion of writings, and become an important element of writings construction. (Chen, 2006) Under the Relevance Theory, DMs are manifestnesses conveyed by the writers to the readers to achieve the maximization of relevance and optimal relevance. (Chen Xinren, 2002) Therefore, DMs play an important role in writings for the sake of the implementation of cohesion and relevance.Causal DMs, as one category of DMs, are employed to express the cause-effect relationship, which is crucial to the writings, especially to the argumentative writings, for the argumentative writings are meant to express a cause-effect relation. However, college students have a lot of problematic uses of causal DMs in current writings, which to a certain extent influence the quality of the writings, especially the argumentative essays. Therefore, the use of causal DMs in college students'writing will be studied in this thesis. Furthermore, in view of the crucial position of causal DMs in argumentative essays and the high frequency of argumentative writings in college writings, it is in the argumentative writings that the use of causal DMs is to be investigated. In a word, this thesis is designed to make a contrastive analysis of the use of causal DMs in non-English major college students'argumentative writings. Throughout this study, some findings and pedagogical implications are obtained on the foundation of the following questions:1. What are the main features of the use of the causal DMs by Chinese non-English major college students with different English proficiency levels in argumentative writings?2. What are the differences of the use of the causal DMs in argumentative writings between Chinese non-English major college students and native speakers?3. Are there overused or underused causal DMs by Chinese non-English major college students in their argumentative writings, compared with native speakers?4. Are there other improper uses of causal DMs by Chinese non-English major college students in argumentative writings, in contrast to native speakers? What are the possible elements that give rise to improper uses of causal DMs?A corpus-based study has been widely developed since the 1990s, providing a new and effective pathway for the study of Second Language Acquisition. And in this thesis, ST3 and ST4 from CLEC and LOCNESS are adopted to make a contrastive analysis of the use of causal DMs in argumentative writings. During the data collection and analysis, the corpus processing software WordSmith 5.0 and Microsoft Excel will be carefully applied. After the study, the following findings are naturally acquired:1. In general, in the argumentative writings, with the improvement of the English proficiency level, both the density and the diversity value of the use of causal DMs by Chinese non-English major college students become higher.2. There are significant differences between Chinese non-English major college students and native speakers when they use causal DMs in argumentative writings. Compared with native speakers, the density of the use of causal DMs is higher while the diversity value is lower.3. Furthermore, they overuse and underuse some causal DMs. So and because take a great proportion among the overused causal DMs, and then it can be concluded that the Chinese non-English major college students are inclined to use the informal words and have the colloquial tendency.4. There are some other improper uses of causal DMs. Besides the tendency to use informal words, the use of adverbial causal DMs in improper positions, the abundant use of causal DMs, and the confusion of causal DMs also widely exist. According to the result and discussion, some primary factors, which may exert extensive negative impact on the use of causal DMs in the writings by the Chinese non-English major college students, have been summarized as follows: L1 transfer, cognitive factors and input bias.At last, in view of the differences and the findings, some effective pedagogical implications are suggested to enhance the Chinese non-English major college students'proper use of causal DMs in argumentative writings.