Earticle

This paper considers the discourse functions of "new-this," a term adopted from Wald(1983) in various contexts. Only in the past few decades has the demonstrative this come to be used as an indefinite determiner as seen in “there's this guy she met at the coffeehouse." For this paper, I collected date from TV scripts of Friends, since new-this is more commonly used in spoken English, and this show is about the daily life of six young characters. According to Pince(1981) and Wald (1983), the main function of the indefinite usage of this is to introduce a new referent into discourse. Also, it has been said that new-this is closely associated with topicality, that is, new-this serves to introduce a referent that is going to be talked about, i.e. a new topic. However, providing the examples, I claim that topicality of new-this in relation to the continuing discourse is not an inherent function of new-this. I propose that the discourse functions of new-this is an introducer of new referent making the referent a focus. This function of new-this is very closely associated with the deictic function of this, that is the act of pointing. Pointing out something with a hand gesture in combination with this can easily draw a hearer's attention to a particular object. In discourse, a speaker uses new-this to highlight a new referent in contrast to other elements since the speaker considers the new referent as very important information for the rest of his or her utterances at the speaking moment. Even though there is no extralinguistic clue, the hearer can also accept the new referent as important information since new-this plays a role as a signal. This paper also includes a discussion of vividness of new-this. In a discourse describing a past experience, new-this seems to play a role in making the story vivid. This might be a case of semantic expansion of this as a demonstrative. Since this has the basic meaning of temporal and spatial closeness, new-this also has the effect of bringing a referent from the past into the present, and bringing a referent that is absent in front of the hearer's eyes. This research shows that new-this is used as a means that people choose for effective communication.