| Breaking Bad is a successful American black comedy crime drama.It once hit Chinese online TV screen.It presents us how a real American small potato struggles for life by its absorbing story of ups and downs,which always leaves us suspense and challenges everyone’s guess.The goal of this dissertation is to study the wide use of Discourse Markers(DMs)in Breaking.DMs are markers on the language level,which functions as punctuation and transitions between sentences in a discourse and keeps the discourse coherent and organized as well as serving as indication and implications.Therefore,analyzing the use of DMs can enhance comprehending characters,writing techniques,and understanding the theme of the drama.And studying DMs by establishing a corpus of the script is relatively more systematical,more scientific,more convenient,and high-effective and persuasive than simply analyzing limited examples.According to Fraser,DM is a sub-branch of Pragmatic Markers(PM).Based on Fraser’s theories on pragmatic markers(PMs),especially that of the combination of two PMs,this dissertation conducts contrastive and comparative study of the use of different PMs in Breaking Bad.For the combination of two and more PMs,qualitative method is applied to certain examples and quantitative method is applied with statistical analyses.Based on the corpus of Breaking Bad script,firstly Antconc software is used to locate the PMs which are studied by Fraser on the basis of written English corpus in this corpus,and the different use frequency of each PM are studied and a frequency table is made.Secondly,by using SPSS(Statistics Package for Social Science)19.0,T-test on PMs I mean and you know are conducted and it is found that there is no significant difference between the uses of these two PMs,which means the playwright’s wording in writing the whole script is neither more subjective nor more objective,but remains balanced.Lastly,the combinations of Topic Orientation Markers(TOMs),Attention Markers(AMs)and Contrastive Discourse Markers(CDMs)are retrieved which proves the combination phenomenon found by Fraser in his written English corpus also occurs in oral English corpus and describes new combinations found in this corpus. |
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