Comparative Analysis of Discourse Marker like and It’s Chinese Counterparts

Details

Supervisors

Degand, Liesbeth

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en linguistique, à finalité spécialisée: Linguistics and its Applications for a Multilingual Society

Abstract

This corpus-based study investigates the presence of discourse markers in Mandarin Chinese that exhibit correspondences with the English discourse marker "like". Leveraging the exploration of "like" as a foundational point, the research employs a comprehensive approach, incorporating two spoken language corpora and a bilingual parallel corpus. The American English spoken language corpus, SBC, captures everyday dialogues, while the Mandarin Chinese spoken subcorpus of the CCL corpus serves as the representative dataset for Chinese discourse. The bilingual context is facilitated through the Ted Talk corpus. Guided by the framework established by Müller (2005), the study delves into the discourse marker "like" in English. By meticulously analyzing data sourced from the SBC, the research uncovers six distinctive functions attributed to the discourse marker "like" within the realm of spoken American English discourse. Simultaneously, the inquiry into Mandarin Chinese discourse markers synthesizes insights from prior scholarly investigations to classify these markers into four distinct categories in CCL corpus. Through a comprehensive analysis encompassing over 50 Chinese discourse markers across these categories, the study endeavors to discern parallels in functional roles shared between Chinese discourse markers and the English discourse marker "like". Ultimately, the research identifies three clusters of Chinese discourse markers that exhibit functional resonances with the discourse marker "like".