The Semantics of khn3 and lo1 in Thai Compared to up and down in English: A Corpus-based Study

PACLIC 28 !624 The Semantics of khɨn3 and loŋ1 in Thai Compared to up and down in English: A Corpus-Based Study Junyawan Suwannarat Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Phayathai Road, Pathumwan, Bangkok, 10330, Thailand junyawan.s@gmail.com Theeraporn Ratitamkul Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Phayathai Road, Pathumwan, Bangkok, 10330, Thailand Theeraporn.R@chula.ac.th Abstract This corpus-based study analyzes meanings of khɨn3 ‘ascend’ and loŋ1 ‘descend’ in Thai in comparison with up and down in English. Data came from three corpora: the Thai National Corpus (TNC) (Aroonmanakun et al., 2009), the British National Corpus (BNC), and the English-Thai Parallel Concordance (Aroonmanakun, 2009). Results of the analyses show that there are senses of the vertical spatial terms khɨn3 and loŋ1 in Thai that overlap with those of up and down in English. This reflects a universal image schema of vertical movement and similar semantic extension processes in the two languages. Data from the parallel corpus also reveal that the vertical spatial terms khɨn3 and loŋ1 do not always occur in the same contexts with up and down. But, when they do, the frequently shared meaning involves vertical movement, which is the basic sense of the terms. The use of corpora as a tool to study the semantics of vertical spatial terms in Thai and English makes it possible to obtain objective and naturalistic data as well as to observe frequency of various senses that are in use. 1 Introduction Expressions of spatial directions are common in the world’s languages. Given that spatial direction is a basic concept of humans (Langacker, 1987), spatial terms are expected to be of high frequency in language use. This study examines spatial terms for vertical directions in Thai and English. In particular, we focus on khɨn3 ‘ascend’ and loŋ1 ‘descend’ in Thai in comparison with up and down in English. The words khɨn3 ‘ascend’ and loŋ1 ‘descend’ in Thai are high-frequency words whose fundamental meanings are about vertical movement of upward and downward directions, respectively. Similarly, the words up and down in English have the basic senses of vertical directions. Moreover, both khɨn3 and up can be used to denote non-directional meanings (such as man4 caj1 khɨn3 ‘be more confident’ and speed up), and this is also true with the pair loŋ1 and down (such as sin3sut2 loŋ1 ‘end’ and close down). However, while khɨn3 and loŋ1 occur as main verbs or subsidiary verbs in serial verb constructions in Thai, up and down rarely occur in verb slots in English; they usually appear as satellites accompanying verbs. It is therefore interesting to investigate to what extent these vertical spatial expressions, which belong to different grammatical categories, overlap in terms of senses. To obtain objective, up to date and naturally occurring language data produced by various native speakers, this study utilized data from three corpora. The English data came from the British National Corpus (BNC), and the Thai data were drawn from the Thai National Corpus (TNC) (Aroonmanakun et al., 2009). A parallel corpus, the English-Thai …

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