Abstract
The article discusses the three sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM): hoonn3/honnh4, lah4, and leh4. The three SFPs have been recognized as discourse particles lacking lexical meaning. In this thesis, the core meaning of SFPs as a source of pragmatic functions and extended discursive uses has been proposed to account for multifunctionality and polysemy in SFPs. The semantic cores of SFP as exemplified by hoonn3/honnh4, lah4, and leh4 have been specified respectively as CONFIRMATION, ASSERTION and ASSUMPTION. Syntacticaly, SFPs have been previously perceived as complementizers occupying the C position. However, with the phenomenon of clustering and co-occurrence, it is argued the split-complimentizer phrase in the left pheriphery can be further fine-grained into illocutionary force phrase (ILLP) and clause-type phrase(CTP) (Coniglio & Zegrean 2010). Accordingly, we propose a double layered projection in TSM to account for the lower SFP1 and the higher SFP2, where SFP1 display an interaction between illocutionary force and clause type, while SFP2 implies the proposed simultaneous force, an additional projection that demonstrates the speaker-oriented attitude on the discourse level.