A CORPUS-BASED STUDY ON DISCOURSE MARKERS IN EXPOSITORY WRITING OF CHINESE COLLEGE STUDENTS

Abstract

This study has applied a corpus-based approach with AntConc as a tool, following Fraser’s (1999) Taxonomy of discourse markers to investigate the types and frequency of discourse markers in expository writings of 290 Chinese college students. There are four types of discourse markers: elaborative, inferential, contrastive, and causative, found in Chinese students’ expository writings, however, there were none of the topic-relating markers. Among those four discourse marker types, elaborative markers were the most frequently used markers, followed by inferential, contrastive, and causative. Remarkably, coordinating conjunctions, such as and, but, so, were excessively used.