Semantic prosody in Thai
Creators: name: Supanfai, Pornthip
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2017
Subjects: semantic prosody
Thai
extended unit of meaning
evaluative prosody

description: Semantic prosody is an important concept and has become a primary research
      interest in corpus linguistics. This thesis undertakes the groundwork of
      fundamental research into semantic prosody in Thai, a language which has
      not been subject to studies of semantic prosody before, to set out the
      parameters for subsequent research in this area. In particular, it
      addresses these three research questions:
      
      1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the major approaches to
      semantic prosody proposed in the literature for describing semantic
      prosody in Thai?
      
      2. What variation in semantic prosodies across genres can be identified
      for Thai words?
      
      3. To what extent are the semantic prosodies of words identified as
      translation-equivalents in widely-used bilingual dictionaries in Thai and
      English similar or different?
      
      The datasets employed in the analysis are the Thai National Corpus and the
      British National Corpus. To address each research question, a small number
      of Thai words are selected for the analysis. Two primary approaches, the
      polarity-oriented approach and the EUM-oriented approach, are employed to
      identify semantic prosody. Within the polarity-oriented approach, which is
      founded in work by Louw, Stubbs, and Partington, semantic prosody is
      identified based on collocates, and is restricted to the positive vs.
      negative opposition. Within the EUM-oriented approach, which is based in
      the studies of Sinclair, semantic prosody is identified by examining
      concordance lines for a pragmatic function or meaning that is spread
      across an extended unit of meaning.
      
      The results of the analysis show that the two primary approaches to
      semantic prosody do operate successfully with the Thai data. A range of
      semantic prosodies are identified for /kreeŋcay/ ‘considerate’, /kɔ̀
      ɔhâykə̀ ət/ ‘cause’, and /chɔ̂ɔp/ ‘like’, the objects under study, by the
      two approaches. The discussion of these semantic prosodies shows that the
      two approaches are useful for different purposes. The polarity-oriented
      approach is useful when one’s aim is to investigate a word’s tendency to
      co-occur with positive or negative words. Particularly, it reveals the
      hidden evaluative potential of words whose evaluation is not obvious from
      their core semantics. The EUM-oriented approach is, by contrast, suitable
      for the examination of an extended unit of meaning and its pragmatic
      function in the Sinclairian sense. They both also have some advantages and
      disadvantages in terms of practicality. On the issue of variation in
      semantic prosodies across genres, some variation is indeed found to exist.
      From the concordance analysis of 19 verbs, each in four different genres,
      namely academic writing, fiction, newspaper stories, and non-academic
      non-fiction, 21 different extended units of meaning are identified from 14
      of the verbs. The level of variation in the use of these extended units of
      meaning across genres, which implies variation in semantic prosodies, is
      considerable with some extended units of meaning, but is limited with
      others. In particular, a notable contrast is identified between academic
      and fiction genres in terms of which extended units (and semantic
      prosodies) are common. Finally, the majority of the translationequivalent
      pairs under study (36 out of 48) show the same semantic prosody; of these,
      most present a neutral semantic prosody. In cases where the pairs show
      different semantic prosodies, there are not any cases where one word in
      the pair shows a positive semantic prosody, and the other shows a negative
      semantic prosody, and vice versa. It is thus arguable that there is a
      relationship between semantic prosody in Thai and English – not a genetic
      or areal relationship, but one that arises from a functional basis, that
      is, the meanings that the pairs of words under study express in both
      languages.