A Corpus-based Contrastive Study of "Well" and "Ranhou"

Recently, discourse markers such as "well", "you know" are widely studied either in social linguistics, corpus linguistics or pragmatics. Yet using corpora as a tool to contrast the two types of discourse markers in English and Chinese has not been studied. This corpus-based contrastive study is refreshing in that it makes a comparison between English discourse marker "well" and Chinese discourse marker "ranhou". In this paper, the functions of "well" and "ranhou" will be discussed based on a corpus study. Firstly, this paper reviews the relevant theoretical empirical studies on discourse markers, "well" and "ranhou". Then the functions of "well" and "ranhou" will be studied respectively. Finally, a comparison will be made on the differences between the functions, meaning coherence and potential users. In the end, suggestions for further studies will also be given.