English Non-native Speakers' Use of But in conversation

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to explore English non-native speakers' interactional use of the connective but. Each of the tokens of but in approximately 100 minutes of one-to-one interview and multi-party discussion data was coded and analyzed within the framework of conversation analysis. The findings reveal that as a whole non-native speakers demonstrate different uses of but at different turn-positions in a similar fashion as native speakers do. However, some distinctive features, such as the overuse of the form in environments where other types of discourse markers are generally preferred, indicate non-native speakers' not-yet-complete competence in utilizing a variety of discourse markers.