A Comparative Study On The Use Of Causal Discourse Markers In Linguistic Dissertations Between Chinese And American Postgraduates

The dissertation is one kind of the argumentative writing, which is marked by rigorous logicality and coherence. The accurate use of causal Discourse Markers (DMs) is not only beneficial to build the inner logic framework of paragraphs, but also contributes to expression of ideas in a clear and coherent way. The causal DMs, as one category of DMs. therefore play an important role in the writing of dissertations.This study regards the linguistic dissertations of postgraduates majoring in English as subjects, and builds the learner corpus (LC) and the native corpus (NC), which respectively consists of 33 linguistic dissertations from Chinese postgraduates majoring in English and 31 from American postgraduates. With the aid of Wordsmith soft,30 search words, based on the classification by Mo Junhua. are retrieved from both corpora, and then relative concordance lines are generated. The further refining work to concordance lines should be conducted in order to acquire the most accurate data, because many search words have various functions and semantic meanings except for ones as causal DMs (like since, as. for, etc). Furthermore. Comparative Interlanugage Analysis (CIA) and Error Analysis (EA) are adopted to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses about data obtained from corpora.In the end, it turns out:1) the causal DMs in LC are more than those in NC both in numbers and types; 2) Chinese postgraduates majoring in English are more inclined to use the DMs of result, while native speakers prefer using the DMs of reason; 3) some of causal DMs are overused, underused and misused in LC; 4) there are obvious position differences of causal DMs between Chinese learners and native speakers. Furthermore, the author conducts the research on causes that lead to the overuse, underuse and misuse of causal DMs in LC. in which some examples are held to make explanations to these causes, including intralingual factors, extralingual factors, the lack of stylist awareness and personal preference. By the end of this thesis, the author clarifies the pedagogical implications and limitations of this study for the future study in the field of DMs.