A Corpus-based Analysis Of Discourse Markers In American Political Speeches

Discourse markers are a common linguistic phenomenon which do not contribute to the expression of propositions but play a unique role in utterance production and interpretation as an indispensable part of verbal communication.With the advent of globalization,language plays a vital role in social culture.Numerous experts,both domestic and international,have conducted extensive research on discourse markers in recent years.Discourse markers frequently appear in oral discourse,and political speech is a special type of speech discourse.Therefore,it is a positive academic attempt to study the role of discourse markers in political discourse.Based on the corpus research method,this thesis collects 100 documents of American political speeches from an American political website,converts the document format into TXT format and calculates the word count,then randomly samples 10 political speeches as the research corpus.And the tagging software CLAWS7 is used to annotate the e-texts of ten American political speeches in an attempt to build a small corpus of American political speeches for the study of discourse markers.Next,following Fraser(1993)and the word class features related his classification of the discourse markers,manual annotation of discourse markers is carried out by substitution of the Pos tags with the Pos tags plus the DM tags in the texts.Then,in conjunction with the relevance-adaptation model,this study employs Fraser’s(2005)classification of discourse markers to analyze the corpus combining a quantitative and qualitative analysis,and the corpus retrieval software Antconc3.2.2.1.w to investigate the use and pragmatic functions of various types of discourse markers in political speeches.The research data shows that in American political speech discourse,the frequency of elaborative discourse markers is higher than that of other types.In addition,the frequency of coordinate conjunction and in elaborative discourse markers is the highest,but the frequency of adverbs,subordinate conjunctions,prepositions and prepositional phrases is relatively low.Finally,this thesis analyzes in detail the functions of different categories of discourse markers in different political speech contexts.It is found that the primary function of DMs is to enhance the coherence of discourse thus obtaining discourse relevance.