A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Contrastive Discourse Markers BUT/DAN(SHI)

Contrastive discourse markers(hereafter CDMs) are those functional expressions used tolink two discourse segments which are opposed in meaning, they usually appear in the initialposition of the sentence they introduce but contribute no semantic meaning to the discoursesegment which hosts them. BUT and DAN(SHI) are the most representative and ubiquitousCDMs in English and Chinese respectively, they are intensively used by the speakers as anessential device in language production, furthermore, the elusiveness in their meaning andthe subtlety in their function make them a hot topic for scholars to probe in.Starting from1970s, the study of DMs has long been a topic of intense scholarly interest,resulting in many different schools of scholars approaching it with different theoreticalorientations. However, there are still many fundamental problems concerning theircharacteristics and functions remain unresolved. In addition, still no commonly acceptedexplanation about how DMs works in utterance production is put forward by any one of them.What is more, the differences and similarities between Chinese CDMs and English CDMshave been less written about, not to mention the interpretation of those similarities anddifferences within a reasonable theoretical framework.Building on this background, the present study is particularly designed to contribute tothe on-going dispute of many unresolved problems in relations to CDMs. By employing acorpus-based approach, the present study intends to present a contrastive study betweenEnglish and Chinese CDMs by focusing on the use of BUT and DAN(SHI), the reasonsbehind those similarities and differences will also be explored from an Adaptation-relevancetheoretical perspective, hoping to uncover how CMDs work in utterance production.The present study consists of seven Chapters:Chapter One is the introduction part in which a general description of the backgroundinformation, objective, research questions and significance of the present study are presented;Chapter Two surveys relevant studies of DMs from three perspectives: theoreticalstudies of DMs, empirical studies of DMs and studies of DMs using corpus-based method;Chapter Three presents a systematic description of the definition and classification ofEnglish and Chinese CDMs, together with the rationale of choosing BUT and DAN(SHI) asthe research object;Chapter Four introduces the theoretical framework and research methodology. Themajor claims of Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Relevance Theory, as well as the relationship between the theory and the linguistic phenomenon they focus on will be stated;In addition, the two corpuses used in this study are briefly descried; lastly, the wholeframework in which the present study is carried out will also be illustrated in this part;Chapter Five presents the most important results of the whole comparative study, thus isconsidered as its main body. In particular, this part firstly focuses on the syntactic features ofBUT and DAN(SHI), and then moves to the exploitation of their semantic meanings, andfinally analyzes their pragmatic functions. Most importantly, the similarities and differencesbetween BUT and DAN(SHI) in terms of their syntactic positions, semantic meanings andpragmatic functions are also presented based on the quantitative data got from theinvestigation;Chapter Six summarizes and explains the results of the comparative study, thesimilarities and differences between BUT and DAN(SHI) are synthesized, the reasons behindthose similarities and differences are also interpreted within the Adaptation-relevancetheoretical framework;Finally in Chapter Seven, the whole research is concluded by summarizing the majorfindings of the research, discussing its implications and limitations, furthermore, somerecommendations for future studies are also put forward in this part.The conclusions got from the present contrastive study of BUT in English andDAN(SHI) in Chinese prove the rationality of Adaptation-relevance theoretical framework ininterpreting the working mechanism of CMDs in utterance production: the use of CDMs isnot only pragmatically constrained but also cognitively motivated, to be more specific:various kinds of factors such as cognition and modes of thinking, cultural differences,linguistic forms and specific context may all influence the way they are used incommunication.