This paper takes a contrastive approach to the analysis of the utterance-final particle (UFP) ne 呢 by isolating two core properties: (a) a necessity to look back for contrast and (b) a demand to continue. From these two core properties all the meanings and interpretations can be directly or indirectly derived. On the basis of the analysis, the paper proposes a 3-level semantic-pragmatic system for the UFP. As a particle, ne is identified as a discourse marker to increase relevance for discourse-pragmatic purposes. When compared with the structural schema from the grammaticalizaton point of view, the proposed pragmatic operational system shows a remarkable difference in terms of its core properties. While the historically oriented analyses take semantic properties as the core, such as “interrogation” in Qi (2002) and “unchanged state” in Tsao (2000), the proposed system takes communicative functions as its core properties.