| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 87 === Abstract
This thesis investigates Taiwanese he and che from a pragmatic-discoursal perspective. This analysis is based on 5.5 hours' recording of natural spoken data, including four daily conversations, three radio call-in programs and five TV drama series.
In this study, it is pointed out that in addition to referring to an element extralinguistically or textually, he and che also serve as non-referential connective markers beyond the sentence level. Furthermore, their meaning contrast is found not to lie primarily in spatial specification, as recognized in the previous studies, but in interaction aspect. Specifically speaking, he is used to mark addressee involvement but che is to mark speaker involvement. Such an interactive function is able to disentangle the neutralization phenomenon in which both he and che can be used to refer to an entity of identical distance to the speaker, or a proper noun needless to specify, or a stretch of preceding discourse or a connective marker. Against the previous studies, their marking conversation involvement exhibits that the selection of he or che in these *neutralization* conditions actually makes a difference in interaction aspect, thus keeping their basic relationship of complementary opposition. Finally, this study also reveals that the various functions of he and che may undergo a grammaticalization development from their basic uses as a spatial deixis, which helps achieve a better understanding of their polysemous nature. From their basic spatial meaning, he and che can be developed to refer to a stretch of discourse or connect two units of discourse under the shift of domain from the extralinguistic world to the discourse universe. And from their spatial differentiation, the contrast between them may be derived to lie in their marking conversational involvement intended by the speaker through metaphorical extension of meaning. This directionality of derivation from extralinguistic to textual and from objective to subjective, in fact, conforms to the grammaticalization development from concreteness to abstractness, which has been observed in other languages.
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