A Corpus-based Study On Discourse Markers In The Conversations Of Maritime English

Discourse markers, being a hot spot of many researchers, play an important role in daily conversations. With the same status in the conversations of Maritime English, discourse markers greatly facilitate the oral communication in shipping industry, which make the conversations easily-understandable and well-transmitted. The thesis based on the previous research results, intends to explore the features of Discourse Markers in the conversations of Maritime English by adopting a corpus-based research method.The retrieval work is performed to calculate the discourse markers in the conversations of Maritime English and the general English, with the help of AntConc and manual work. The achieved statistics are discussed and analyzed from the perspective of lexical density, lexical frequency, positional distributions, semantic classifications and a case study of the discourse marker you know. It comes with the result that the lexical density of the two corpora is similar. The top ten frequently used discourse markers and the least frequently used ones are all obtained through a frequency list of AntConc. The investigation of positional distributions of discourse markers indicates that the medial position in Maritime English Corpus occupies the largest proportion but the percentage is lower than that in Brown, while the initial and final positions of discourse markers are both higher than that in Brown. The major difference in semantic classifications of both corpora lies in the meaningful fillers which appear frequently in Maritime English Corpus while they are fairly fewer in Brown. A case study on the discourse marker you know is conducted, and five major pragmatic functions (giving information, revising information, introducing given information, taking turn management and saving face) are pointed out.It is the findings that the author hopes can benefit the pedagogical, academic and ship working fields. Teachers and students can be guided by the findings in their teaching and learning process; the people working in shipping industry, especially the seafarers can apply the frequently used discourse markers in their daily communication; a little enlightenment can be drawn for further research from the present study.