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

EVENTIVITY AND STATIVITY IN THAI VERBS
Natsuki Matsui
Chulalongkorn University
1. Introduction
As an “isolating” language, Thai lacks morphological markings of inflections and
conjugations, and the copula occurs only with nominal complements. Whether Thai has a
distinct category of “adjectives”, discrete from the category of verbs, has been a highly
controversial issue in the grammatical studies of the language. Whereas Prasithrathsint
(2000) claims that the so-called adjectives in Thai are subsumed under the category of
verbs because their syntactic behavior is not different from that of verbs, Sookgasem
(1996) holds that Thai has the syntactic category of adjectives. Post (2008), more recently,
also argues that the category of adjectives in Thai should be recognized since a certain
cluster of predicates bears a close resemblance to predicates of other languages, both
semantically and functionally. If we investigate Thai syntactic categories in terms of the
criteria that are standardly applied to European languages, it will be concluded that Thai is
a straightforward example of an “adjectival-verb language” (Schachter 1985:18), which
does not distinguish between verbs and adjectives. Schachter presents Mandarin Chinese as
a typical example of an adjectival-verb language (1985:18). Dixon (2004:13), however,
throws doubt on this fairly standard assumption by pointing out that recognizing an
adjective class in the “languages in which adjectives show a rather different profile” cannot
be standardized according to the study of European languages.
In this paper, I will examine the semantic differences of eventive and stative
predicates in Thai, with a view to shedding light on the problem of the categorial
distinction. Despite the common assumption that Thai does not distinguish between verbs
and adjectives syntactically as well as morphologically (Prasithrathsint 2000), explicit
differences are found in the usage of certain predicates. Some researchers treat predicates
such as dii ‘good’ and su��ay ‘beautiful’ as “adjectives” based on the functional and
semantic standards (Sookgasem 1996, Tanaka 2004, Iwasaki & Ingkaphirom 2005, Post
2008). In his analysis of Lao, a language morphosyntactically similar to Thai, Enfield
(2004, 2007), on the other hand, classifies “adjectives” as a sub-type of verb in the
language, because the words which denote property concepts in Lao have a similar
syntactic behavior to verbs but also have distinguishing characteristics with other types of
verbs in terms of their function.
By extending Enfield’s view to Thai, I will draw the conclusion that Thai
“adjectives” should be treated as a particular class, though not as an independent category.
Given that the category is determined by the morphosyntactic behaviors or the language, a
clear boundary between “adjectives” and “verbs” in Thai cannot be found to distinguish
these two varieties as two syntactically distinctive categories. As Post (2008) points out,
words denoting property concepts in Thai clearly involve some particular functions which
deviate from other types of verbs, however. Thus I will identify Thai “adjectives” as a sub-
Natsuki Matsui. 2009. Eventivity and Stativity in Thai Verbs. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics
Society 2:85-104.
Copyright vested in the author.