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Chapter One   Introduction 

1.1   Research Background 
In  daily  conversation,  people  frequently  use  some  words  or  lexical  expressions like so, well, because, therefore, but, after all, you know, I mean, etc. to achieve better understanding  and  communicative  effects.  These  above  words  and  expressions  are regarded  as  discourse  markers,  which  have  no  effect  on  the  propositional  content  of the  sentences  in  which  they  occur  and  encode  only  procedural  meaning  instead  of conceptual (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Blakemore 1996). [26] [5] Since the 1970s, an increasing number of linguists especially pragmatists became very interested in discourse markers (hereafter DMs) and they have done a great deal of work to study this most common language phenomenon having been ignored in the past. Although  extensive  studies  on  DMs  have  been  carried  out,  people  still  disagree with each other about what DMs are, how to classify them and what their features are. because  DMs  can  be  analyzed  from  different  perspectives.  There  are  three  main approaches  to  study  DMs,  namely  Deborah  Schiffrin’s  variationist  approach,  which puts  a  high  value  on  how  DMs  help  improve  discourse  coherence;  Bruce  Fraser’s pragmatic  approach,  which  attempts  to  explore  the  pragmatic  functions  of  DMs  in discourse  and  Diane  Blakemore’s  relevant  theoretic  approach,  which  focuses  on  the semantic constrains that DMs impose on the hearer’s interpretation. CDMs  refer  to  lexical  expressions  that  signal  contrastive  relations  between linguistic  segments  in  discourse.  As  an  important  subclass  of  DMs,  CDMs  possess many representative properties and characteristics of DMs and occupy the prominent place in the research of DMs due to their semantically special property of contrast in the  process  of  communication  and  interpretation.  However,  although  CDMs  are frequently  used  in  Chinese  learners’  writing,  few  systematic  studies  have  been  done on  the  use  of  them  in  written  English.  Previous  studies  on  CDMs  mainly  focus  on some  particular  CDMs  such  as  on  the  other  hand,  but  and  on  the  contrary,  besides, most of the studies are based on two comparable corpora, namely the CLEC (Chinese Learner  English  Corpus)  and  BNC  (British  National  Corpus),  which  aim  to  discuss the acquisition of CDMs by non-English-major students in their spoken English or the use  of  CDMs  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。