A CLEC-based Research On Characteristics Of Contrastive Discourse Markers Used By Chinese College Students

Discourse markers,as an important device for discourse cohesion and coherence, are helpful for readers to seek the optimal contextual hypnosis and contextual effects and make the communication go smoothly. They have become not only one of the hot issues in the field of conversation analysis and pragmatics, but also play an important role in the field of second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, translation and cross-linguistic comparison. Researchers at home and abroad have studied discourse markers from different perspectives, and they have achieved fruitful results.Previous studies mainly focus on the effects of discourse markers in the oral communication on discourse coherence, while there are less researches on discourse markers in written communication, and researches on subsystems with similar features and functions of discourse markers are rare. Contrastive discourse markers play indispensable roles in discourse generation and discourse interpretation and have attracted scholars’ widespread attention because of their unique contrastively semantic and pragmatic characteristics. At present, empirical researches on contrastive discourse markers in writings are not systematic. In view of this, this thesis aims to study characteristics and existing problems of contrastive discourse markers in Chinese college students’ writings so as to accelerate transformation from inter language to the target language and achieve the success in written communication, as well as enrich and promote researches on discourse markers.With a corpus-based method and CLEC as the tested corpus, LOCNESS as the reference corpus, this thesis makes a comparative analysis on contrastive discourse markers used by Chinese college students and the native English speakers in their English writings with the aid of Antconc, Chi-square Calculator and other analytical instruments. This thesis mainly discusses the following two questions:1. Generally, whether there are any differences in density, diversity and flexibility of contrastive discourse markers used by Chinese college students and the native English speakers in their English writings? Specifically, whether there are any problems such as overuse, underuse and misuse of contrastive discourse markers in Chinese college students’ English writings compared with the native English speakers?Results of this study show that, generally speaking, the density, diversity and flexibility of contrastive discourse markers in Chinese college students’English writings are inferior to those of the native English speakers. In addition, contrastive discourse markers used by Chinese college students in their English writings are simple, colloquial. Still, there exist some problems in using some specific discourse markers such as overuse, under use and misuse.This research has some implications for English teaching and researches. Discourse markers work as a bridge in discourse generation and discourse interpretation. They are a significant language mechanism to make discourse cohesive and coherent and ensure a successful communication. However, there is not an absolutely decisive relationship between the number of discourse markers and the writing quality. Therefore, teachers should cultivate the students’ awareness in stylistics, syntax and pragmatics and enable students to use discourse markers properly, flexibly and diversely. In addition, the corpus-based method used in this study can be generalized to other phenomena in English study.