A Study Of Inferential Discourse Markers In Chinese English Majors’ Spoken English: A Corpus-based Approach

Discourse markers are words or expressions commonly used in daily communicationwhich signal the connection of an utterance to its wider context. Being syntacticallydetachable and semantically meaningless, discourse markers make no contribution to thetransmission of meaning from the grammar perspective. Moreover, they convey proceduralmeaning instead of conceptual meaning and make a communication successful by indicatingthe metapragmatic awareness of both the hearer and the speaker. In brief, as an importantaspect of pragmatic competence, discourse markers play an indispensable role in spokenlanguage. Therefore, Since the1980s, the study of discourse markers has been a hot issue inpragmatics in western countries. Many scholars have done researches in the field fromdifferent perspectives and the most typical ones are semantic-pragmatic approach,grammatical-pragmatic approach and cognitive-pragmatic approach. However, compared withthe flourishing study of discourse markers at abroad, domestic studies of DMs do not beginuntil the21st century. And most of the papers delve into discourse markers from theperspective of overview of foreign studies and the investigation of individual discoursemarkers. Meanwhile, there have been few large-scale studies on the use of discourse markersby Chinese EFL learners, let alone the systematic study on the use of inferential discoursemarkers by Chinese English majors. Therefore, the present study constitutes an attempt toexplore the use of inferential discourse markers in spoken English on the part of ChineseEnglish majors.Based on the collective strengths of previous theoretical and empirical studies, thetheoretical framework and research methodology was specifically proposed for the presentresearch. Generally speaking, the thesis will concentrate on the use of inferential discoursemarkers by Chinese English majors in spoken language on the basis of relevance theory. Itwill adopt a combining method of a corpus-based approach and contrastive interlanguageanalysis to compare the use of inferential discourse markers by both Chinese English majorsand native English speakers. By presenting the findings of the statistic analysis of the datafrom SECCL (Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners) and BNC (British NationalCorpus), it will provide enlightenments on the teaching and learning of spoken English inChina, especially for the English majors.Employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the present study compare the dataselected from SECCL and BNC to explore the features and existing problems of using inferential discourse markers by Chinese English majors in terms of frequency, syntacticpositions and so on. The research findings are as follows:⑴In spoken English, the use ofinferential discourse markers by Chinese English majors are significantly different from thatof native speakers in terms of frequency. Chinese English majors use fewer inferentialdiscourse markers than native speakers in both overall occurrence and respective frequency ofeach word (excluding so).⑵In spoken English, the use of inferential discourse markers byChinese English majors are significantly different from that of native speakers in terms ofsyntactic positions. Chinese English majors only use inferential discourse markers insentence-initial and sentence-medial positions while native speakers adopt them in sentence-initial, sentence-medial, and sentence-final positions. Moreover, Chinese English majorsemploy significantly fewer inferential discourse markers in sentence-medial position thannative speakers. With respect to individual makers, the problems of underuse and overusecoexist in adopting inferential discourse markers by Chinese English majors. And this factmay due to the limited input the students have and the negative pragmatic transfer of themother tongue.On the basis of the findings above, the present study proposes that explicit teaching beadopted in Chinese English majors’ classroom to raise their awareness of the importance ofdiscourse markers and thus increase their exposure to the use of discourse markers. Theresearch findings, on the one hand, provide a new perspective for the study of IDMs and somevaluable implications for English teaching and learning in spoken discourse; on the otherhand, it paves the way for the researchers who want to commit themselves to further studyingthe use of IDMs by providing some practical experiences and pointing out the feasibledirections for further researches.