Use of the Pronoun « ça » in Spoken French

This thesis deals with the use of a demonstrative pronoun "ça" in contemporary spoken French; especially in regard to its referential and syntactical function. The theoretical part of the thesis defines the pronoun and summarizes its use in specific syntactical structures. In addition, it defines the pronoun in contrast to pronouns with similar functions; particularly the pronoun "cela" which is considered to be a full standard form of the pronoun "ça". Moreover, the thesis pays attention to reference of a spoken, mostly French, language and its specifics. The empirical part draws from two corpora in order to analyse the occurrences of the pronoun "ça". The first one, Europarl, focuses on a pseudo-spoken argumentative type of speech and the second one, CLAPI, focuses on a spoken spontaneous speech. The analysis aims to identify various empirical and referential uses of the pronoun "ça" in the given corpora. The aim of this thesis is to show how the choice of the language register influences the use of "ça" in modern language. The final part of the thesis presents a questionnaire that was given to French speakers with the intent to find out whether there might be some instances in which the pronoun is considered as irreplaceable, even in standard French