Author: Simone Müller Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027293961 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
While discourse markers have been examined in some detail, little is known about their usage by non-native speakers. This book provides valuable insights into the functions of four discourse markers (so, well, you know and like) in native and non-native English discourse, adding to both discourse marker literature and to studies in the pragmatics of learner language. It presents a thorough analysis on the basis of a substantial parallel corpus of spoken language. In this corpus, American students who are native speakers of English and German non-native speakers of English retell and discuss a silent movie. Each of the main chapters of the book is dedicated to one discourse marker, giving a detailed analysis of the functions this discourse marker fulfills in the corpus and a quantitative comparison between the two speaker groups. The book also develops a two-level model of discourse marker functions comprising a textual and an interactional level.
Author: Uwe Mehlbaum Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3640528638 Category : Discourse markers Languages : en Pages : 89
Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Bayreuth (Lehrstuhl für Englische Sprachwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: Discourse Marker is a term which is relatively hard to define. A simplified way is to say that it refers to words or phrases which are usually used to structure sequences of a speech or a written text. Examples of Discourse Markers include expressions like actually, you know, well or OK. Discourse Markers are lexemes which could often simply be left out, without changing the semantic function of a sentence, because they usually don't contribute to the sentence's truth-condition or the propositional content. However, they often have other important functions. Apart from being used in order to organise and structure a speech, they often indicate some aspects of attitude (Renkema 2004:169) and the relation between different utterances. Discourse Markers appear very frequently in speeches (usually every few seconds); in written texts they are very frequent as well, though usually not as frequent as in verbal speech. Discourse Markers can also give information about social dimensions, group identity and relations between communicating people (Aijmer 2002:14). Although this definition is by far not entirely comprehensive, it should serve for the moment in order to clarify the subject of this paper. This paper is going to explain the term Discourse Markers in some detail and then analyse the use of Discourse Markers by speakers of non native English, namely members of University Parliamentary Debating competitions (a close definition will follow in chapter 2), who are from the countries Germany, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Turkey and Malaysia. It will be analysed and explored how often Discourse Markers occur in the speeches of different speakers and what exactly the different Discourse Markers are used for.
Author: Kathrin Biegner Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3640867300 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 11
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,3, , language: English, abstract: Learners of a second language are confronted with different challenges. They have to learn new words and grammar rules and how to apply them. To improve their skills they need to be corrected or they must have the possibility to correct themselves by comparing their usage of the foreign language with that of native speakers. However, there are some implicit rules to using a language which are rarely detected by both learners and native speakers. One of these cases is the usage of discourse markers (DM) (Svartvik 1980:171). Swedish linguist Jan Svartvik assumes that such particles’ inadequate applications have more far-reaching consequences during communication than grammatical incorrectness (1980:172). In this essay I will concentrate on the DM like since it is amongst the most frequently used by native speakers of English (Fox Tree 2006:727, 2007:309; Müller 2005:197). As research has shown, non-native speakers use like less often as a DM than native speakers (Fuller 2003:200; Fung and Carter 2007:435; Hikyoung 2004:121; Müller 2005:230). Thus, I will firstly argue that the infrequent use of like as a DM is one feature by which non-native speakers can be recognized as such. Secondly, I will show that this deficit in pragmatic competence effects their communication with native speakers negatively. I claim that the reasons for the lower rate of like relates to its pragmatic functions and the way in which English is taught.
Author: Dirk Siepmann Publisher: Psychology Press ISBN: 9780415349499 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 390
Book Description
This book offers a corpus-based comparative study of an almost entirely unexplored set of multi-word lexical items serving pragmatic or text-structuring functions. Part One provides a descriptive account of multi-word discourse markers in written English, French and German, focussing on dicussion of interlingual equivalence. Part Two examines the use of multi-word markers by non-native speakers of English and discusses lexicographical and pedagogical implications.
Author: Kathrin Biegner Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3640867734 Category : Languages : en Pages : 33
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,3, language: English, abstract: Learners of a second language are confronted with different challenges. They have to learn new words and grammar rules and how to apply them. To improve their skills they need to be corrected or they must have the possibility to correct themselves by comparing their usage of the foreign language with that of native speakers. However, there are some implicit rules to using a language which are rarely detected by both learners and native speakers. One of these cases is the usage of discourse markers (DM) (Svartvik 1980:171). Swedish linguist Jan Svartvik assumes that such particles' inadequate applications have more far-reaching consequences during communication than grammatical incorrectness (1980:172). In this essay I will concentrate on the DM like since it is amongst the most frequently used by native speakers of English (Fox Tree 2006:727, 2007:309; Müller 2005:197). As research has shown, non-native speakers use like less often as a DM than native speakers (Fuller 2003:200; Fung and Carter 2007:435; Hikyoung 2004:121; Müller 2005:230). Thus, I will firstly argue that the infrequent use of like as a DM is one feature by which non-native speakers can be recognized as such. Secondly, I will show that this deficit in pragmatic competence effects their communication with native speakers negatively. I claim that the reasons for the lower rate of like relates to its pragmatic functions and the way in which English is taught.
Author: Sandra Götz Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027272336 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
This book takes a new and holistic approach to fluency in English speech and differentiates between productive, perceptive, and nonverbal fluency. The in-depth corpus-based description of productive fluency points out major differences of how fluency is established in native and nonnative speech. It also reveals areas in which even highly advanced learners of English still deviate strongly from the native target norm and in which they have already approximated to it. Based on these findings, selected learners are subjected to native speakers' ratings of seven perceptive fluency variables in order to test which variables are most responsible for a perception of oral proficiency on the sides of the listeners. Finally, language-pedagogical implications derived from these findings for the improvement of fluency in learner language are presented. This book is conceptually and methodologically relevant for corpus-linguistics, learner corpus research and foreign language teaching and learning.
Author: Marcus Callies Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027254311 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
This book presents the first detailed and comprehensive study of information highlighting in advanced learner language, echoing the increasing interest in questions of near-native competence in SLA research and contributing to the description of advanced interlanguages. It examines the production and comprehension of specific means of information highlighting in English by native speakers and German learners of English as a foreign language, presenting triangulated experimental and learner corpus data as corroborating evidence. The study focuses on learners' use of discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, preposing, and it- and wh-clefts, an underexplored field in SLA research to date.The book also provides a critical re-assessment of the study of pragmatics within SLA. It has largely been neglected to date that L2 pragmatic knowledge includes more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech acts. Thus, the book argues for an extension of the scope of inquiry in interlanguage pragmatics beyond the cross-cultural investigation of speech acts. It also discusses pedagogical implications for foreign language teaching and will be of interest to applied linguists and SLA researchers, language teachers and curriculum designers.
Author: Gaëtanelle Gilquin Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing ISBN: 9027271798 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 172
Book Description
The papers brought together in this volume illustrate how spoken corpora (be they native or learner corpora) can provide insights into various aspects of errors and disfluencies such as pauses and discourse markers. They show, among others, that such phenomena can be influenced by factors like gender, age or genre, and that they can correlate with, e.g., informativeness and syntactic complexity. Crucially, they also demonstrate that items which are often dismissed as mere disfluencies can fulfil important functions and thus play an essential role in the management of spoken discourse. The book should appeal to linguists who are interested in spoken language in general and in errors and disfluencies in speech in particular, as well as to specialists in second language acquisition and language testing who want to know more about the nature of fluency and accuracy. Originally published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16:2 (2011)
Author: Simone Müller
Author: Uwe Mehlbaum
Author: Kathrin Biegner
Author: Dirk Siepmann
Author: Kathrin Biegner
Author: Lan Fen Huang
Author: Sandra Götz
Author: Marcus Callies
Author: Uta Lenk
Author: Gaëtanelle Gilquin