A Study On The Use Of Discourse Markers In Chinese Non-english Major University Students’ English Argumentative Writings

In recent years, scholars increasingly pay close attention to cohesion and coherence in the field of Discourse Analysis. And DMs, as one of the cohesive devices, are brought into sharp focus. This thesis investigates the use of DMs in English argumentative writings by the Chinese non-English major university students. Based on Fraser’ classification of DMs in 2009, this study adopts the theoretical basis developed by Bachman and Jung Ji-Yong on DMs, aiming to find out whether there are differences of pragmatic competence on the use of DMs in their English argumentative writings between the Chinese non-English major university students and the native British English university students under the guidance of the theory of corpus linguistics. According to these differences, it attempts to provide some suggestions in the teaching of English writings in Chinese universities.This thesis intends to find out whether there are differences on the use of DMs between the Chinese non-English major university students and the native British English university students. This study adopts contrastive interlanguage analysis, corpus-based method, quantitative and qualitative methods. With mini CLEC as the tested corpus and mini LOCNESS as the reference corpus, this study makes a comparative analysis on DMs employed by the Chinese non-English major university students and the native British English university students in their English argumentative writings with the aid of AntConc 3.4.3w and Log-likelihood ratio calculator and other tools. DMs are extracted by AntConc 3.4.3w from the two mini corpora based on the classification of DMs by Fraser in 2009. After the true cases of DMs identified, the author begins to discuss the use of DMs in the two mini corpora. In this thesis, the general characteristics of DMs in the two mini corpora are investigated firstly, and then the three types of DMs and 67 DMs are studied respectively. By contrastive analysis, this thesis intends to investigate the characteristics and existing problems on the use of DMs by the Chinese non-English major university students in their English argumentative writings.Data comparison, data analysis and discussion show that pragmatic competence of the Chinese non-English major university students is inferior to that of the native British English university students. The overall frequency and the diversity on the use of DMs employed by the Chinese non-English major university students are lower than those used by the native British English university students. What’s more, the frequencies of three types of DMs and the frequencies of 67 DMs employed by Chinese non-English major university students have differences compared with the native British English university students. In addition, there are many problems in Chinese non-English major university students’ English argumentative writings, such as underuse, overuse and misuse on the use of specific DMs.The possible factors of these differences are analyzed, including lack of input, language transfer and test-related influence.