台灣閩南話近似詞語用功能研究

The main purpose of this porject is to investigate the discourse functions of approximators in Taiwanese conversation. Approximators include quantifiers, vague category identifiers, placeholder words, etc. To arrive at convincing generalizations about the use of approximators in Taiwanese, we aimed to accumulate more Taiwanese natural conversation data to add to a 12-hour spoken corpurs established before. The focus of the report is on the distal demonstratives he/hitle/hitlo in Taiwanese, since they are found to be most frequent in Taiwanese conversation. Five major functions based on previous literature are identified of demonstratives. The situational use serves to establish a physical entity or a place in the immediately surrounding physical context. The discourse deictic use occurs when a distal demonstrative refers to a preceding discourse proposition. The anaphoric demonstrative makes reference to an entity established in the previous discourse and helps hearers keep track of the referents. The recognitional use involves reference to entities that is assumed by the speaker to be existent in the hearer‘s knowledge. The pause filling function refers to the use of a demontrative to hold an NP slot in a turn when the speaker has difficulty naming a particular entity or concept. The analysis and discussion demonstrate how the speaker develops the topic of talk and how the discourse participants are introduced, tracked, or shifted. This line of inquiry has rarely been undertaken in Taiwanese natural discourse. Our findings, we believe, will make significant contribution to the interactional aspect ans sequential relevance of distal demonstratives in Taiwanese.