UCLA

Demonstratives play an important role in communication. Traditional analyses of demonstratives focused primarily on their morphology, semantics, syntax, and to some extent, on their diachrony and acquisition. Based on a 257,000-character conversational database, this dissertation examines how na ‘that’ can shift from marking spatial deixis to signaling the speaker’s stance in Mandarin Chinese conversation by linking discourse-pragmatic analysis with interactional actions. More specifically, it identifies 1) functions of na and the relative frequencies of its different usages; 2) contexts in which na typically appears and reasons speakers use na in those contexts; 3) interrelations among different usages; and 4) functional preference of na across positions within a turn.The results show that exophoric use is very much marginalized in natural conversation (2 tokens out of 1261 tokens, 0.2%). The predominant referential na is used as a discourse deictic (315 tokens out of 1261 tokens, 25.0%). Anaphoric na is relatively frequent (191 tokens out of 1261 tokens, 15.1%), with its most salient occurrence appearing in medial position of an utterance (75 tokens). The previous understudied recognitional use is by no means sparse (98 tokes out of 1261 tokens, 7.8%). I show that recognitional na is not restricted to contexts where a referent is identifiable based on specific knowledge or shared common ground between the speaker and the addressee. The speaker routinely makes use of recognitional na even when he/she knows that the referent is discourse new and hearer new. I argue that in contexts like this, the speaker employs recognitional na as an interpersonal strategy to establish a solidarity between himself/herself and the addressee and create an in-group perspective to better engage the addressee in the conversation. The non-referential na (655 tokens out of 1261 tokens, 51.9%) on the other hand, is routinely used by speakers to express contrastive meaning, encode attitudinal stances that are often disaffiliative, taking the form of disagreements, challenges, or criticisms. More specifically, I propose three functional categories of non-referential na: i) initiating a question (186 tokens out 1261 tokens, 14.8%); ii) indexing a disaffiliative stance (179 tokens out of 1261 tokens, 14.2%); and iii) projecting a question or a disaffiliative stance (130 tokens out of 1261 tokens, 10.3%). The analysis also indicates that these interactional functions of non-referential na are linked to the distal demonstrative’s deictic meanings in the sense that the na-prefaced turn indexes that the current turn is built from a prior turn but displays a shift in focus and often a contrastive or disaffiliative stance. With respect to functional preference of na across positions within a turn, the results demonstrate that na tends to serve to register a turn that embodies contrastive information or disaffiliative stance in response to a prior turn in turn-initial position. In medial position within an utterance, na functions to keep track of and orient the addressee’s attention to an element of the ongoing discourse. In medial position inside a turn, an utterance-initial na does not show a functional preference; it either is used to track a referent or to signal contrastive information/disaffiliative stance.