Chinese Discourse Topic Markers

We often change topics in language writing and daily talk. Though topic shifting is neither the mainstream of discourse communication nor conforming to the cooperative principle, topic shifting is a important device in textual organization, it plays an important role in discourse cohesion and keeping effective communication. In order to make it more polite when we want to change topic, we need to use some sentences or phrases to remind topic shifting. Because of the importance of topic shifting in communication and the shortcoming of current studies, this thesis think the in-depth analysis of topic shift markers can not only help deepen the research on the strategies of topic shifting, but also complement the co relational research on discourse structure, so there has possibility and necessity to dig deeper into the topic shifting and the markers of topic shifting. This paper try to classify the topic shift markers which often used in Chinese according to its function,, and figure out the difference of pragmatic function and context between each marker, then on this basis,we want to find out some principles of using topic shift markers and discover how to make topic shifting more natural. This article is divided into five chapters; the main part is the second, third, forth chapter.The first chapter is introduction, introduces the reason for writing, the correlative research summary, theoretical basis and the preparation for writing.The second chapter discusses the object of this paper, analyzes the properties and forms of the topic shift markers in Chinese, meanwhile, and identifies15commonly used topic shift markers in Chinese according usage frequency.The third chapter is most important part of this paper. It concerns on the function of15commonly used topic shift markers. In this chapter, we classifies15Chinese commonly used topic shift markers into8types, and on the basis of the theory of mete-pragmatic consciousness, we also explain the pragmatic function of each marker.The forth chapter is also an important part of this paper. It devotes to analyze the context of different topic shift markers. We observe it from two aspects:linguistics context and situational context. Thereby we attempt to find out the usage rules of each marker.The last chapter is the conclusion of this paper. This part generalizes the content of this thesis and points out the disadvantages of it. There hasn’t any systematic theory of topic shift markers at present, so this thesis just carries out a simple study on the form, function, type and the context of Chinese topic shift markers. Though it is not so good, it can complete the current research on topic shifting, it has a great significance on teaching us how to use topic shift markers.