A Corpus-Based Pragmatic Analysis of Discourse Marker “I Think”

Abstract

Prosperous development of corpus linguistics thrived the study on discourse markers, and among them, I think received a large share. Based on former researches, this paper adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods and made a contrastive analysis of the textual features of I think, choosing fiction and TV, these two various genres within COCA. The results demonstrate that there are sharp differences between these two genres in I think in terms of the frequency, position, collocation and function. There is still a certain correlation between where I think appears and the function it performs. In short, the new perspective study in this paper shed light on an investigation of other discourse markers.