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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the present study 
Early in the 1950s, it was Randolph Quirk (1953) who first brought the concept of discourse markers into existence. In his speech “Random Talk-Some Features in Daily Oral Discourse”, he proposed that some words such as you see, you know and well  as  adjuncts  play  important  roles  in  the  daily  communication  (Quirk,  1953; Svartivik, 1980: 167). Ever since then, researches on DMs have developed rapidly with more and more scholars studying them from different kinds of perspectives.  Until 1980s, the prime time of researches on DMs, there appeared three main perspectives  which  were  semantic-pragmatic,  grammatical-pragmatic  and cognitive-pragmatic. Though different perspectives may lead to different opinions, they  all  hold  the  view  that  DMs  are  very  important  for  the  generation  and interpretation  of  discourse.  Different  research  perspectives  have  different terminologies for DMs, such as discourse connective (Blackmore, 1987), discourse operators  (Redeker,  1991), discourse markers (Schiffrin, 1987,  Blackmore 1996), pragmatic connective (Van Dijk, 1979), and pragmatic marker (Fraser, 1988) and so forth. The author in this thesis will use the terminology of discourse markers since it has been adopted by more and more scholars at home and abroad.  
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1.2 Research questions 
This  thesis  aims  at  investigating  DMs  in  English  letters  written  by  college students of non-English majors and analyzing the relationship between the use of discourse markers and the quality of writing as well as giving some pedagogical implications. It will present the general situation of non-English majors’ use of DMs which includes total frequency, difference between category distribution based on the classification of DMs proposed by the author and the most frequently used DMs and the problems of using DMs. To further discover the features of non-English majors’ employing DMs, this research adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis, attempting to answer the following questions: Research question 1: Do the students with high scores use more discourse markers than the low scores students? Are there any significant differences between the two groups in adopting different categories of DMs? Research question 2: What are the general features of students using DMs in their compositions? Research question 3: What are the problems and possible causes of students using DMs in their compositions? 
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Chapter 2 literature review 

Discourse  markers,  though  carrying  little  or  no  meaning  with  them,  have special  roles  to  play  in  a  discourse.  It  is  through  discourse  markers  that  the metapragmatic  awareness  can  be  manifested  clearly.  Thus,  a  large  number  of domestic  and  foreign  scholars  are  keen  to  research  discourse  markers  and metapragmatic  awareness  本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。