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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Conversation, as an interactive spoken exchange device, is very import in people's daily life.Depending on the interest or knowledge level, conversation participants talk with each other toexchange ideas, share their feelings, and convey their intentions and so on. The studies ofconversation in different disciplines include language philosophy, linguistics, sociology,psycholinguistics，and computational linguistics.Among conversation related studies, the study of topic is one of the most frequentlymentioned primaries. When a conversation happens in an authentic communicative situation, it isusually perceived as a fluent and coherent exchange of information, and some of the elementslike pauses, interruptions or even repetitions are neglected. But when transcription and analysiswork are being done, it will be easy to realize that the seemingly coherent exchange ofinformation actually constitutes sub-topics, which are trifling and trivial, and topic boundaries,which intertwine the smaller units. That is to say, people usually talk from topic to topicsmoothly.The study of topic is generally divided into two broad categories of studies of grammaticaltopic (sentence topic) and conversational topic (discourse topic). For the first category,linguistics focused on topic-comment structure in which the syntactic subject is viewed as grammaticalized topic and had been widely researched. For the category of discourse topic，somescholars have conducted researches on the notion of topic and topic structures. The studies havebeen done are both terminological profusion and confusion. Scholars offer different definitionsin which researchers have consistently entailed the notion that topics are bounded. Thisboundedness not only defines the unit, but also presents conversation participants with theopportunity for organization and management. Topics are organized continuously, producing acommon topic, or discontinuously，being generated by participants shifts. Studies of the boundedtopic in topical progression have therefore focused on topic development. Researchers have alsosuggested some mechanisms behind topic shift which play a prominent part in keepingconsecutive talk.
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1.2 Research Significance
In the present thesis，the investigation and analysis of the possible functions of topicmanagement markers in different topic development phase will be conducted in casual Englishconversations based on the corpus. For this purpose，the definitions of topic are presented, amodel of topic management framework is established and also a quantitative study with datafrom native English speakers and Chinese English learners are conducted. In this study, topicshift is defined as part of the process of topic development. Different scholars have differentclassification for topic development in which some of them overlap. Under the theory of Crow[i]and Gardner[2], a framework is designed for data analysis on the corpus of SOAP; the fiinctionsof topic management markers used by each interlocutor are analyzed. With this analysis done, the author is inspired to compare the Chinese learners' spoken English based on COLSEC withthat of the native speakers' and find out what is useful and helpful for the Chinese learners inconducting and participating in conversation in English. It is hoped that this proj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。