Han, Echo Class Discourse Markers

Discourse markers play a significant role in linguistic interaction behaviors. As adistinctive discourse feature in spoken languages, it is a key component in conversationalcommunications. Every language has its own commonly used discourse markers, whiledifferent discourse markers can be used in different situations with various socialdistribution characteristics. For example, an echoing discourse marker can be seen veryoften in Japanese and Chinese conversational communications. The listener can participatein the conversation by expressing himself through “casual responses”. This type ofdiscourse markers usually serves as a response or an answer, playing the role of expandingtopics. Therefore, it is of much theoretical and practical importance to conduct acomparative study between the echoing discourse markers in Japanese and Chineseconversational communications. Based on the relevance theory, conversational analysisand previous studies, this thesis attempts to comparatively analyze the commonness andindividuality between Chinese and Japanese echoing discourse markers from theperspectives of cognition, semantic function, syntactic function and discourse function.A corpus-based conversation analysis finds out that there are common place anddifference respectively between the Chinese and Japanese echoing discourse markers.Semantically, they are both functioned as approval and acceptance, but Japanese echoingdiscourse markers have the meaning of echoing, doubting and showing surprise as well.There exists obvious difference between the syntactic functions of Chinese andJapanese. Echoing discourse markers in Chinese can be used repeatedly and followed byother compositions to serve new functions, while those in Japanese don’t have suchkind offunction. Chinese and Japanese echoing discourse markers basically have the samediscourse function. Both of them can be used to express feedback and politeness, whileJapanese doesn’t have the concession function.