A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of Contrastive Discourse Markers Used By Native English Speakers And Chinese EFL Learners In Spoken English

Discourse Markers(DMs),being syntactically detachable and semantically meaningless,are words or expressions occurring prevalently in utterances or texts.They do not make contribution to propositional meaning or semantic meaning in an utterance,but with procedural meaning.In order to achieve a successful communication,DMs are employed to indicate the metapragmatic awareness of the speaker.In a word,DMs are indispensable to the logical relationships between two utterances and are used frequently in our daily life.With the development of pragmatics,an increasing number of studies of DMs have emerged in the past four decades in western countries.Different scholars have studied DMs from different perspectives and the most representative three are coherence-based approach,grammatical-pragmatic approach and relevance-theoretic approach.Compared with the booming research of DMs abroad,studies of DMs at home have lagged behind.The current domestic studies mainly focus on either the overview of foreign advanced theories or investigation of individual DM,studies on the use of discourse markers by Chinese EFL learners are quite limited,especially the systematic study on contrastive discourse markers by Chinese EFL learners in spoken English.Therefore,this research intends to contrast the use of CDMs between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers in spoken English with the assistance of corpus.Besides,the features and existing problems of using CDMs by Chinese EFL learners in terms of frequency,syntactic position and so on will be explored.This research aims to answer three questions: 1.what are the similarities and differences of the use of contrastive discourse markers between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers in terms of frequency and type? 2.What are the similarities and differences of the use of contrastive discourse markers between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers in terms of syntactic positions? 3.In comparison with native speakers,are there any inappropriate uses of the CDMs made by Chinese EFL learners—and if yes,what are the causes? Based on the Relevance Theory and qualitative and quantitative analysis in this study,we come to the conclusions:(1)Chinese EFL learners use much more CDMs than native English speakers,but they rely heavily on some certain words such as but,still,though,etc.And they cannot use CDMs as flexibly and diversely as native English speakers in terms of types.(2)Chinese EFL learners tend to overwhelmingly put CDMs in in medial position and they cannot use CDMs as flexibly and diversely as native English speakers in terms of syntactic positions.(3)Compared with native speakers,Chinese EFL learners indeed overuse,underuse or misuse some CDMs in their spoken English,which may attribute to the negative pragmatic transfer,insufficient second language input as well as pragmatic fossilization.This research enriches the research of CDMs and provides some inspirations to the acquisition of CDMs as well as spoken English teaching.