| This dissertation is a comprehensive investigation of the discourse-pragmatic functions of four selected sentence enders -telakwu, -ketun, -nuntey, and -ney in various social interaction. Thus, the sentence enders are called interactive sentence enders since they occur in interaction.;Three interactive sentence enders (-telakwu, -ketun, and -nuntey ) have undergone de-categorization. The clausal suffixes which underwent grammaticalization tend to lose their original morphological or syntactic categories and became sentence enders with the diachronic omission of the main clause. Through grammaticalization, the sentence enders gained various discourse pragmatic meanings.;The sentence ender -ney, which was originally a self-addressed type sentence ender has undergone a functional shift and evolved into an interactive sentence ender in contemporary conversation. Originally this self-addressing type sentence ender -ney is used to express a spontaneous discovery or recollection of an event.;These changes of semantic and pragmatic functions of the interactive sentence enders are motivated chiefly by the speaker's usage of strategic politeness toward the addressee to mitigate illocutionary force. Intonation also greatly affects the meaning of utterances in interactions.;This study could not be dealt with a single specific theoretical model. Thus, the main descriptive model of my dissertation are examined with a network of different but interrelated theories and approaches: Interactive sociolinguistics approach (Schiffrin 1994), politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987, R. Lakoff 1983, 1989), speech act theory (Austin 1962, Searle 1969), and current grammaticalization theory (Hooper, Paul J, and Elizabeth Traugott 1993).;This study sought to construct an explanatory framework for these enders in several interactions to provide teachers with a better understanding of their usage, their meanings, and their discourse pragmatic functions. |
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