proto-southwestern-tai revised: a new reconstruction - seals 22

IDENTIFYING PREPOSITIONS IN THAI
Kitima Indrambarya
Kasetsart University
< fhumkmi@ku.ac.th>
0 Abstract
Various linguists have examined words which are traditionally called prepositions in Thai.
Warotamasikkhadit (1992) proposed that there are no prepositions in Thai. Other linguists
maintain that there remain prepositions in Thai (cf. Savetamalya 1989; Indrambarya 1995;
Prasithrathsint 2000). Words which appear in the following frame [NP V (NP) __ NP]
have been widely discussed and classified into various categories: verbs (Indrambarya
1995), nouns (Savetamalya 1989; Indrambarya 1995, Prasithrathsint 2000), prepositions
(Indrambarya 1995, Prasithrathsint 2000), adverbs (Indrambarya 1995) or even
conjunctions (Warotamasikkhadit 1992).
With new findings in recent years, my aim in this paper is to take a closer look at
each of the words which may appear in the above construction. Using precise and reliable
set of syntactic criteria, I can synchronically identify prepositions in Thai. The data are
drawn from present-day standard Thai corpus. The result shows that words which may
appear in this position may have homophonous forms and they may belong to one of the
four lexical categories, namely, prepositions, verbs, nouns or adverbs -- with the limited
number of the last two classes.
1 Introduction
The topic of prepositions has been of interest among linguists. While Warotamasikkhadit
(1992) proposes that there are no prepositions in Thai, other linguists (Kullavanijaya 1974;
Savetamalya 1989; Indrambarya 1994, 1995; Starosta 1994; Prasithrathsint 2000;
Takahashi 2005) maintain the existence of Thai prepositions. Words which are
traditionally viewed as prepositions have been analyzed as nouns, verbs, prepositions,
adverbs or even conjunctions. Some may have homophonous forms of different word
categories (Singnoi 2000; Savetamalya 1989; Indrambarya 1994, 1995; Prasithrathsint
2000).
Some linguists have looked into these words diachronically and found that some of
these words are in the process of grammaticalization from verbs to prepositions (Diller
2001; Takahashi 2005) or from nouns to prepositions, (Prasithrathsint 2000, Singnoi
2000:51) resulting in homophonous forms of different word classes.
In this paper, I reexamine words which appear in the following position and refine
the criteria to synchronically identify their syntactic categories of the words traditionally
referred to as prepositions in the following frame : [NP V (NP) _ NP].
2 Criteria to Identify the Syntactic Category of the Word in Question
Linguists have proposed a few criteria to distinguish prepositions from nouns. Here are the
criteria which have been used to identify nouns.
Kitima Indrambarya. 2009. Identifying Prepositions in Thai. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics
Society 2:37-51.
Copyright vested in the author.
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