Abstract:
To analyze (1) typological semantic categories of three-participant event construction (2) linguistic strategies for coding three-participant events in Thai and (3) the mapping between semantic roles and grammatical functions of participants in three-participant event constructions in Thai. The Cognitive Linguistic approach is adopted in this study. The data used in the analysis is drawn from the Thai National Corpus. It is found that three-participant event constructions express 9 typological semantic categories: 1) transfer event 2) caused-motion event 3) communicative event 4) asking for possession event 5) receiving possession event 6) refusal event 7) deprivative event 8) creating event and 9) instrumental action. Three-participant events in Thai are linguistically realized into 2 major constructions. The first type of constructions is linguistically realized without any marker. The second type of constructions employs various markers which can be classified into 3 groups 1) grammaticalized serial verbs, namely hây to give, tɔ̀ɔ to extend, sùu to, thɨ̌ŋto arrive, khâw to enter, sày to put on, loŋ to descend, càak to leave and cháy to use 2) prepositions, namely kᴂ̀ᴂto, kàp with, accompanied by, phʉ̀a for duây with (instrument) and khɔ̌ɔŋ of and 3) grammaticalized serial verbs and prepositions, namely hây-kᴂ̀ᴂ give-to, hây-kàp give-with, loŋ-bon descend-on, loŋ-nay descend-in. Constructions with different realizations can denote the same three-participant events but express different construals of the same objective scenes. Five strategies are found to encode three-participant events in Thai 1) direct argument strategy 2) adnominal strategy 3) oblique strategy 4) serial verb strategy and 5) grammaticalized serial verb and preposition strategy. The mapping between semantic roles and grammatical functions exhibits one-to-many relations: 1) subject carries agent and goal roles 2) direct object carries theme and source roles and 3) indirect object carries goal source and instrument roles.