The Research Of The Inferential Discourse Markers

Whether in oral or written language, the inferential discourse markers play anim’potrant role of organizing the discourse, indicating the speakers attitude andemotion，guiding the listeners to understand the discourse. Based on the definition andclassification of inferential discourse markers, this paper not only studies thediscourse distribution, contextual characteristics and the three function of discoursemarkers from the synchronic perspective, but also studies the source of the inferentialdiscourse markers and investigates their mechanism of formation from the diachronicperspective. This paper includes five chapters.The ifrst chapter mainly elaborates the purpose and the signiifcance of theresearch, introduces the theoretical results and shortcomings of previous researches,and explains the theories, methods and the data sources of this paper.The second chapter selects the inferential discourse markers which will bestudied in this paper and divides them into four classes as “kanlai”，"xianran",""zhemeshuo and "wuyf based on the definition of the inferential discourse markers.It also studies the discourse distribution and contextual characteristics of eachsubclass, and summarizes the discourse mode of the inferential discourse markers onthis basis.The third chapter analyzes the functions of the inferential discourse markersmainly from three aspects of the functions: discourse organization, interpersonalinteraction and context adaptability. Discourse organization function mainly includesform coherence function and content coherence function. Interpersonal interactionfunction mainly includes marking objective inference, marking viewpoint andevaluation and etc. Context adaptability function mainly includes adaptation to the linguistic context, to the scene context and to the background context.The fourth chapter is divided into two parts. The first part mainly studies thediachronic semantic change of each subclass of the inferential discourse markers fromthe perspective of grammaticalization. The second part mainly makes reasonableexplanations to the inferential discourse markers formation mechanism from theperspective of cognitive linguistics.The fifth chapter summarizes the conclusion of this paper and points out theinnovation and the problems to be further discussed.