A Study On Discourse Markers In English Academic Writings From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

From the perspective of relevance theory,a speaker uses DMs to constrain the interpretation recovered by a hearer,and to ensure that the hearer interprets every utterance in the smallest and most accessible context that yields adequate contextual effects for no unjustifiable effort(Blakemore,1992).Understanding the use of DMs is significant in language understanding.The present research adopts the perspective of relevance theory and employs the corpus-based method to analyze English native speakers' use of DMs in academic writings across four fields of study in the BAWE(British Academic Written English)corpus.The primary aim of this paper is to provide detailed analysis on DMs across different fields of study and offer reference for academic writings of EFL and ESL learners from different fields of study.Following Becher's(1989)taxonomy of disciplines,the author classifies four fields of study,Arts and Humanities(AH),Social Sciences(SS),Life Sciences(LS)and Physical Sciences(PS)as soft pure,soft applied,hard applied and hard pure fields of study respectively.Three research questions have been addressed:(1)What are the similarities and differences in type and frequency of DMs across four fields of study?(2)What are the similarities and differences in distribution of DMs across four fields of study?(3)What are the similarities and differences in the syntactic position of DMs across four fields of study?The results of this study indicate that:(1)Soft science fields of study employ more types of DMs than hard science fields of study,and the difference is mainly caused by the fact that hard science fields of study employ fewer types of DMs which introduce contextual implications.(2)Soft science fields of study employ significantly more DMs than hard science fields of study on three levels: on the level of the total frequencies of DMs,on the level of the frequencies of DMs in three categories and on the level of the frequencies of DMs in 16 subcategories.The author has demonstrated that:1)the total frequencies of DMs across four fields of study are significantly different,and form a hierarchy of use: soft pure(AH)> soft applied(SS)> hard applied(LS)> hard pure(PS);2)the frequencies of DMs in three categories across four fields of study are also significantly different and form a hierarchy of use: soft pure(AH)> soft applied(SS)> hard applied(LS)> hard pure(PS);3)the frequencies of DMs in 16 subcategories across four fields of study are also in the same descending order: soft pure(AH)> soft applied(SS)> hard applied(LS)> hard pure(PS)except for several particular cases.Besides,on the third level,the differences across four fields of study are not all statistically significant.This study points out that the significance level of the differences across four fields of study depends on the level of frequencies,and that the differences across fields of study may be more significant than the differences across disciplines.(3)Though the frequencies of DMs are significantly different across fields of study,the distributions of DMs across fields of study are quite similar.Different fields of study share many frequently used DMs in common.(4)Soft science fields of study are more flexible than hard science fields of study in terms of the syntactic position of DMs,because they more frequently employ less frequent patterns,while hard science fields of study are inclined to employ patterns which are frequently used.