Nitipong Pichetpan
University of Sydney
Thammasat University
This paper discusses Thai free descriptions of caused separation (henceforth CS) in an attempt to address the lexical semantic question of how speakers of Thai linguistically encode events. How humans categorise, talk about or “name” events through language is one of the key questions in the study of linguistic encoding of human experiences of the world (cf. Vulchanova and van der Zee (Eds.), 2012). Much of the earlier cross-linguistic and monolingual exploratory research has been conducted to address the lexico-semantic aspect of the issue using experimental corpora (Gullberg and Burenhult, 2012; Malt et al., 2014; 2008, Vulchanova, Mertinez, and Vulchova, 2012, among others). Yet to date, Thai, a Mainland Southeast Asian language, has still been one of the relatively understudied languages in that respect, with the use of spoken data as commonly partial towards applications of evidence from written language (cf. Premsrirat, 1987; Thepchuaysuk, 2016; 2017). This study’s presentation and discussion, thus, contributes to the existing literature regarding Thai about the issue through experimentally elicited data, and, therefore, extends earlier work in lexical and semantic frameworks. The CS domain is chosen here because of its primary experientiality in human life. It, thus, pertains to the universality of lexicalisation, accordingly useful for further cross-linguistic comparisons, potentially to resolve the matter of linguistic semantic categorization at the typological level. A video elicitation task (i.e., a subset of the ‘cut’ and ‘break’ clips by Bohnemeyer et al., 2001) was employed to collect colloquial descriptions for CS events by seven adult native Thai-speaking informants. The verbs used to name such video clips were inputted as variables to cluster analysis, which helps match the perceptual stimuli to such lexical items (cf. Majid et al., 2007), resulting in dendrograms. The dendrograms aid in revealing distinctions between different events of CS and conclude such categorisation’s internal structure in Thai. The results show that, based on similarity and differences in labelling of the video clips, the linguistic encoding of CS in Thai is argued to hinge on a system of conceptual features, which determines the carve-up of CS in linguistic semantics. Specifically, Thai makes a clear instrument-versus-non-instrument distinction at the most coarse-grained level in the CS domain. The finer-grained classification suggests the number of meaningful top categories where CS scenes generally share the same set of conceptual features. These categories differ in the complexity of their hierarchical structure since some that are deeper in hierarchy as classifiable into more and more delicate subcategories. Given the hierarchically organised linguistic distinctions of CS in Thai, resting on sets of conceptual features, this points to the use of salient event-related features as parameters for semantic categorisation. As well, such distinctions help explain, in a way, that an event is ordinarily describable with more than one verb in a language such as Thai because it can be linguistically encoded quite flexibly at different levels of categorisation by the same or different speakers.
(Presented in the 2020 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum : Thai-Tai Language and Culture, 20 July 2020, The St.Regis Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Department of Thai, Department of Linguistics, Southeast Asian Linguistics Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University)