A Comparative Study Of Adverbial Conjunctions Only And Zhishi(只是) In American And Chinese Classic Sitcoms

Only and zhishi(只是)are linguistic words that are frequently used in English and Chinese daily communication,which belong to adverbial conjunctions.There is a“transitional zone”between the adverb and the conjunction.These words in this zone have both modifying function and connective function and they are called adverbial conjunctions.Recently,a growing number of scholars have begun to do further researches on this kind of words,but they mainly pay attention to written discourse,rarely study spoken language.As an emerging branch of linguistics,international linguistics focuses on the language forms used in daily interactive communication and highlights the importance of spoken materials in interaction.Hence,this thesis takes the dialogue in the classic sitcoms Friends and i Partment that are popular by college students as research material,and explores the semantic relations,interactive functions and interactional mechanisms of adverbial conjunctions only and zhishi(只是)from the perspective of interactional linguistics.Based on the cohesion theory and interactional linguistics,this thesis adopts comparative method,qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the examples of only and zhishi(只是)in the classic sitcoms and gets the following results.Firstly,from the perspective of semantic relations,adverbial conjunctions only and zhishi(只是)can not only express exceptional additive relation among the turns,but they can also have negative and complementary adversative relations.Furthermore,exceptional additive relation can be subdivided into two kinds of relationships:1)inclusion relation,which is that B is one of the components of A,namely A consists of B;2)non-inclusion or parallel relation,namely A and B semantically belong to the same category or a higher-level category.Adverbial conjunction only is more frequently used in spoken language than adverbial conjunction zhishi(只是).In addition,only commonly indicates exceptional additive relation in the discourse while zhishi(只是)indicates negative adversative relation.Secondly,adverbial conjunctions only and zhishi(只是)have such distinct interactional functions in different positions and sequences as turn-constructing functions,subjectivisation function and emphatic function.They can occur in the initial position of the turn for opening a new turn.In the middle position,they can maintain the turn,express speakers’thoughts,and attitudes,as well as stress important information.Besides,only can transform a turn to other conversation participants actively or passively in the final position.Thirdly,from the perspective of cohesive devices and interactional mechanisms,adverbial conjunctions only and zhishi(只是)have the repetition,as well as their cooccurrence and collocation with other different components,which form interactional mechanisms of only and zhishi(只是),making discourses coherent.Whereas,there are some slight differences between their cohesive elements.In daily communication,speakers prefer to use three set patterns of only and zhishi(只是)to reply others’inquiries and questions for the sake of expressing their opinions,attitudes and emotions.The purpose of this thesis is to compare and analyze the use of only and zhishi(只是)in spoken English and Chinese,to offer a new perspective for the further study of such words,to deepen the learners’understanding of oral similarities and differences between spoken English and Chinese,to improve their appreciation of television classics and their oral expression ability,and to provide a reference for the oral language teaching of Chinese or English as a foreign language in the field of rules and theory.