Research of the Pragmatic Functions of Lexical Chunks as Metadiscourse in Polylogues under Computational Linguistics

Abstract

With the prevalence of Internet, the demand of language processing is increasingly higher, computational linguistics, a new interdisciplinary subject of computer research and natural language processing, emerges, which is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective and provides computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. The present study seeks to explore the use of lexical chunks as metadiscourse in polylogues and has found that students can use the lexical chunks as metadisourse to perform the pragmatic functions, including endophoric marker, mitigator, filler and hedge. Through the comparison with the study of computational linguistics, it is also found that students' understanding of lexical chunk is basic, and it is reasonable to infer that students can not fully grasp the lexical chunks used in the daily communication in terms of the proper forms and the pragmatic functions, and misusing happens fairly frequently. The study highlights the significance of integrating the teaching mode which involves lexical chunk specifically in English textbooks and lectures for EFL.