The Cognitive And Pragmatic Representation Of Discourse Markers

The using of discourse markers(DMs) is a hot topic in today’s discourse analysis andpragmatic research. From different perspectives, scholars have different opinions about thediscourse markers, which has caused disagreements on its name, definition, classification andfunction. Most scholars agreed that discourse markers don’t affect the true value of theutterance but provide a pragmatic restraining effect on the generation and interpretation ofutterance. Meanwhile, they can help the listener understand the speaker’s or writer’scommunicative intention with procedural meaning instead of conceptual meaning. At preset,studies of DM have changed the perspective from syntactic/semantic—pragmatic tocognitive—pragmatic, so that scholars can reveal justifications of the DM in utterance anddiscourse (Ran Yongping,2000). Therefore, from the perspective of cognition and pragmatics,this thesis studies the effect of DM in senior English expository writing within the frameworkof Relevance Theory, which is the core theory of the cognitive pragmatics.According to "Full-time Compulsory General High School English CurriculumStandards", English writing is one of the four language skills that students should developduring senior high school period. And as an important examination item, the expositorywriting is one of the three writing styles (argumentative, expository, narrative) that thestudents must manage. The use of DM in writing can contribute to the connections betweensentences and paragraphs, which can help the readers understand the speakers’ communicativeintention effectively. In Blakemore’s(1987) view, the most significant function of DM is toguide the generation and interpretation of the utterance through specific characteristics ofcontextual effects. The use of DM is to minimize the efforts of processing DM in order tomaximize the contextual effects.From cognitive and pragmatic point of view, this thesis tries to find out the situation ofthe use of DMs in English expository writing by senior high school students based onRelevance Theory. What’s more, through the guidance of the use of DMs in Englishexpository writing, this thesis can analyze the misuse of DMs in English expository writingfurther and explore how to guide senior high school students to use DMs correctly.Through data analysis, the thesis finds that the DMs are used to reveal the logicalrelationship consciously in English expository writing by senior high school students. Thestudents tend to use DMs frequently but only involve a few kinds of DMs, and always usesimple ones. Meanwhile, there exists misuse, excessive use and lack of use of DMs in Englishexpository writing, from which we can reach a conclusion that it is necessary to teach theDMs in English expository writing. And the study finds that as long as the teachersconsciously guide students to use DMs in the teaching process, then the misuse of DMs canbe reduced significantly.The study aslo finds that, in the teaching process as long as theteachers can consciously guide students to the proper use of Discourse Markers, discoursemarkers misuse can be reduced significantly.At last, based on the findings of the research, this thesis offer some pedagogicalimplications about the DMs teaching in English expository writing in senior high school. First, not only should the teachers introduce the meaning and functions of DMs, but also shouldintroduce the proper form and applicability of DMs to the students. Second, teachers candesign exercises to strengthen the correct use of DMs in writing and stress the proper usage ofthe DMs to guide students to think and write in English.