Features of contemporary Thai narrative texts and their relation to Thai cultural characteristics

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study examines the linguistic representation of four essential aspects of communication, i.e. the marking of time, the marking of causality, the characterization of people and the description of places and space in narrtive language. The data material is M.R. Kukrit Pramoj's novel "Si Phaendin". The study intends to put linguistic phenomena into a broader cultural context. The concepts and general views of discourse analysis are more apt for such an undertaking than traditional grammars the terminology of which often describes Western languages only. The study takes into account the ideas of a philosophy of language, founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt and reformulated by Benjamin Lee Whorf as the Whorfian Hypothesis. A more recent proponent of the "world view of language" theory is the American linguist George W. Grace who regards language as men's crucial tool of reality construction. The findings of the linguistic analysis show that the absence of morphological time marking contributes to the dominance of the chronological order of narration and the representation of causality by means of resultive conjuncts. Both exact marking of events in the past and exact marking of causing events occur rarely and appear not to be of great importance. This corresponds with a karmic world view which focuses on the consequences of one's actions more than on the causes. The absence of adjectives in Thai contributes to a general tendency to characterize people by means of their behavior and their actions. This too corresponds to a Buddhist world view that perceives the present as the result of past deeds. The representation of places seems to be more important than the representation of time. Places convey status, for instance, by describing the location of people's libing quarters as high or low. Status and hierarchy are also conveyed by terms of address. According to the karmic world view, the different places in the social hierarchy depend on the degree of accumulated merit or demerit.