THAI COLOR TERMS AND THEIR STRUCTURES

Abstract

          This research aimed to study the color terms in Thai language and their structures by collecting data from Thai National Corpus in novel category.  The data were collected during the years 2008 - 2017 by using 13 key words as: white, black, red, yellow, green, blue, light blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, red - orange and gray. This study is a linguistic research by data analysis from documents and Berlin and Kay’s theory of color terms (1969) is being used as the main conceptual framework. The research found that all 13 basic color terms have still been in use at present and 332 non - basic color terms were found in data. The non - basic color terms of green were mostly found, following by pink, yellow, brown, red, white, purple, orange, gray, light blue, blue, black, and red - orange, respectively.The structures of color terms are divided into 2 patterns,1) Pattern of basic color terms is: [(‘color’) + basic color term], 2) Patterns of non -basic color terms are divided into 3 patterns as: type 1 [(‘color’) + (extended word) + basic color term + extended word + (extended word) + (extended word)], type 2 [(‘color’) + basic color term + (extended word) +       non - basic color marker + basic color term + (extended word) + (extended word)] and type 3 [(‘color’) + basic color term + non-basic color marker + extended word]. This study also showed the new knowledge of the evolution of Thai basic color terms that is on the 4^th stage so there are only 5 basic color terms in Thai language as: white, black, red, yellow and green. But blue, light blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray are non - basic color terms because they are the same names as things.