Do Chinese speaking learners acquire discourse markers at the level set by the PCIC: Positions and combinatorics.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the use of discourse markers by Chinese speaking learners of Spanish. Specifically, we are interested in describing not only the levels at which these units are acquired and the functions they fulfil, but also other variables which have been less studied: the orational position which the markers occupy in the learners' productions and the lexical items with which they are usually combined. For this purpose, a corpus analysis of learners of the markers también, pero, por eso, porque and después. The results show that Chinese speaking learners use these markers with a great positional freedom and that their combinatorics is rather less in comparison with the usual ones in native productions.