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Mohammad Ghaffary

Mohammad Ghaffary

Academic rank: Assistant Professor
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4012-0093
Education: PhD.
ScopusId: 55573741900
HIndex:
Faculty: Literature and Languages
Address: Arak University
Phone:

Research

Title
A Comparative Study of the Frequencies and Functions of Discourse Markers in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale Based on Fraser’s Model with Pedagogical Implications
Type
Thesis
Keywords
Discourse Markers, Frequencies, Functions, Novels
Year
2021
Researchers Majid Amerian(PrimaryAdvisor)، Mohammad Ghaffary(Advisor)، Alimohammad Mohammadi(Advisor)، Ramin Namaki Araghi(Student)

Abstract

The current study compared the frequency of occurrence, and the pragmatic functions of Discourse Markers (DMs) in two novels: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale (1985). It relies on Fraser’s (2005) model to investigate the frequencies, and Brinton’s (1996) classification to recognize the DMs’ pragmatic functions. To this purpose, approximately 38 percent of each novel was selected from the initial, middle, and final parts. The corpus contained of 71663 words from Jane Eyre and 37090 words from The Handmaid's Tale. For the first hypotheses of the study, two raters evaluated the frequency of DMs. The results indicated no significant difference between the frequency of DMs used in Jane Eyre and The Handmaid's Tale. In addition, the range of frequencies in both novels were similar to each other (EDMs> CDMs> TDMs> IDMs). For the second hypothesis of the study, two other raters judged the pragmatic functions of DMs. The pragmatic functions observed in both corpora included thirteen functions. The findings showed that eight functions were not used significantly differently in Jane Eyre and The Handmaid’s Tale. However, three functions differed significantly in their uses, and for two functions statistical analysis were not possible to be performed. Additionally, the results of the study can have some pedagogical implications for teaching and learning reading comprehension and literature.