专业英语语言学毕业论文范文篇一
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
In English speaking, there are many words or expressions, like “oh, you know,you see, I mean, that is to say, in other words, as I said”, which probably are commonforms of discourse expressions in speech communication, and they are collectivelyreferred as “discourse markers”. They are playing certain semantic and pragmaticfunctions to control interactive verbal communication in various ways in the forms ofconjunctions (and, because, therefore), adverbs (incidentally, actually), interjections(oh, well), phrases or clauses (I mean, you know, as a consequence of). People mightseldom notice this kind of “small words or phrases” which are subconsciously used tofunctionally form the coherent contexts in order to achieve the purpose ofcommunication.
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1.2 The Purpose and Significance of the Present Study
The study of discourse markers has been conducted numerously and it is still afield which is ambiguous. As Brown and Yule (1983:1) put forward, “the analysis ofdiscourse, is necessarily, the analysis of language in use. As such, it cannot berestricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes orfunctions which forms are designed to serve in human affairs.” Discourse markersoccur in both written and spoken language. Proficient EFL speakers probably canhandle discourse markers skillfully and smoothly on a subconscious level, whichhelps them to be more fluent in the language speaking. The occurrence of discoursemarkers during human communication is an indisputable fact; nevertheless, so farthey have not been entitled with an acknowledged and unified interpretation of name,definition, classification, and function.Discourse markers have aroused a large number of scholars’ researchenthusiasms in the past years based on different research perspectives. Recently, thestudy of discourse markers has been conducted from the perspective of syntax,semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics. Discourse markers play a role invarious ways to regulate the interaction of speech communications, although they donot constitute propositional contents directly and are not restricted by syntacticstructures. The speech meaning will still be understood by decoding of the discoursemarkers, such as topic-shift, information added, and conversional turns in theutterance. Moreover, discourse markers are widely used in various language situationsto achieve different aims such as discourse pause, transition effect, discoursecoherence, and pragmatic function. The proficiency of discourse markers can makethe discourse more coherent so as to make the communication smooth. Therefore, thestudy of discourse markers is significant theoretically and practically.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Chapter Overview
Research of discourse markers originated in the mid-20th century. In 1953,Randolph Quirk put forward that discourse markers commonly existed in the spokenEnglish. Linguistics has gradually noticed that the discourse markers were arepresentative feature in human languages which can be accompanied by the aid ofcognitive, social, expression and discourse knowledge (Huang, 2001). Discoursemarkers were also recognized as the structures with procedural meaning and withoutprocedural meaning, which demonstrated that they would not influence utterance truthcondition. However, the use of discourse markers could indeed help communicationto be effective in the process of communication. Schiffrin's (1987) Discourse Markersis recognized as staples of the study of discourse markers, which systematicallysummarized the research on discourse markers.In this chapter, discourse markers were mainly introduced from the aspects ofdefinitions, classifications, characteristics, and functions. After the generalintroduction of the basic items, representative studies of d
