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This thesis aims to probe the use of discourse marker but as repair by Chinese advanced English majors in group discussions. During the past ten years, the study of discourse markers (DMs) has developed very quickly in linguistics, with dozens of articles appearing yearly (Aijmer,2002). Numerous studies have attempted to specify the meaning or function of an individual DM or small sets of DMs in various languages, and several attempts have been made to characterize DMs in a more general way (Schiffrin,1987). However, most of the previous studies concentrate on the use of DM by native speakers. Only some studies focus on the EFL learners, especially Chinese EFL learners.Since communication is a dynamic process, the speaker may correct or repair the utterances in order to eliminate misunderstanding and smooth communication. The framework of this study derives from the work by Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977). With the help of corpus tools and SPSS, this study adopts both quantitative and qualitative analyses in order to reduce the subjectivity. The study has got several findings:First, Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse but in group discussions compared with native speakers and Chinese EFL learners’use of but in the test environment. Second, repair ranks a high rate among the different pragmatic functions DM but performed. Third, DM but always functions as the initiation move in the repair organization. Finally, Chinese EFL learners tend to use but to make different-information-repair rather than appropriateness-repair and error-repair.The current study produces both practitional and theoretic implication for Chinese EFL learners’use and acquisition of DM but. Though limited, the major findings of the thesis, with reference to second language acquisition, make some contributions to Chinese EFL learners. Moreover, Repair Theory shed light on the understanding and interpretation of DM but and has a wide range of constructive pedagogical implications for English teaching.
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