Abstract:
The current study aims 1) to differentiate NMCCs and synthetic compounds that share structural similarity of noun + verb phrase 2) to identify syntactic structures of NMCCs in Thai, and 3) to analyses factors that condition the occurrence of each structure. The study employs Lexical Integrity Hypothesis to test the internal cohesion of each linear sequence of noun + verb phrase and measures their Type/Token Ratio (TTR). It is found that synthetic compounds have low TTR and behave like single-whole units, so they do not allow syntactic operations, namely intervention, modification, coordination and alteration to affect their lexical status. In contrast, NMCCs have slightly higher TTR and can be affected by syntactic operations. NMCCs in Thai require 2 compulsory comstituents, namely head which is a noun or a noun phrase, and modifier which is an adnominal clause. It is also likely to find one of these clause antecedents, namely thii, seung, an, phuu, waa, phuu seung, thii seung and thii waa preceding the modifying clause. The constructions exhibit 4 different patterns: 1) head noun + clause antecedent + modifying clause with a coreferential unit, 2) head noun + modifying clause with a coreferential unit, 3) head noun + clause antecedent + modifying clause without any coreferential unit and 4) head noun + modifying clause without any coreferential unit. Factors that primarily condition the occurrence of the 4 aforementioned patterns are the presence or absence of the clause antecedent, the presence or absence of the coreferential unit, the functions of the modifying clause and non-linguistic factors. Factors that secondarily condition the occurrence of variants of patterns are grammatical functions of the coreferential unit, semantic properties and thematic roles of the head noun, complexity of constituents, rhetorical stylistics and tones of the utterance. In contrast, predicate-argument structure, the ellipsis, contexts and formal stylistics have nothing to do with the pattern differentiation.