The Verb /kàrúnaa/ and the Quantitative Adverb /nćy/:The Original Sources of Requestive Markers in Thai

Abstract

This article is a study of the grammatical development of the requestive markers /kàrúnaa/ ‘be kind’ and /n ćy/ ‘a little’ in Thai. The objectives of the study are (1) to search for the criteria to distinguish the requestive markers /kàrúnaa/ and /n ćy/ from verb counterparts and the quantitative adverb counterparts respectively and (2) to identify the factors and the processes that change the verb /kàrúnaa/ and the quantitative adverbs /n ćy/ into requestive markers. The grammaticalization approach is adopted in this study. The data used is from the Thai National Corpus.

Based on data of modern Thai, the criteria for the classification are (1) syntactically, the requestive marker /kàrúnaa/ does not occur with the subject in the sentence but the verb counterpart does and (2) semantically, the requestive marker/n ćy/ must occur in the context of a request only but the quantitative adverb counterpart does not. The factors involved are (1) syntactic: verbs in Thai appear in serial verb constructions, i.e. the verb /kàrúnaa/ normally appears in front of other verbs in serial verb constructions and (2) semantic: inherent semantic features in connection with kindness and small quantity encourage grammatical change. The processes involved are (1) decategorialization (2) semantic bleaching (3) persistence and (4) metaphorical extension.