The Semantic Extension of /kàt/ in Thai: A Cognitive Semantic Study

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the senses of /kàt/ in Thai and to analyze the semantic relations between them. Data on the word /kàt/ was collected by randomly selecting samples of 300 sentences containing the word /kàt/ from the Thai National Corpus. The researcher collected only /kàt/ simple word. It is found that /kàt/ has 9 senses: 1) to use teeth to press against something. 2) to press something firmly with teeth, as an indication of tolerance. 3) to press teeth through something, for tearing into wounds to destroy, eat, etc. 4) to fight each other by pressing teeth to injure the body parts of the other. 5) to bring animals to fight each other by pressing their teeth to injure each other's organs, which used to be called a game 6) to decompose a wound 7) corrode or fade 8) to brawl and 9) talking to brawl. The senses from 1) to 5) are physical meanings concerning the action of teeth, while the senses from 6) to 9) are metaphorical meanings concerning the action of teeth. The senses of /kàt/ are related to one another. The word /kàt/ extends the senses from physical meaning about action of teeth to metaphorical meaning about action of teeth by way of two cognitive processes, which are metaphor and metonymy. The processes are divided into 4 categories according to the Riemer’s ‘Four categories theory of polysemy’ (2005) such as metaphor application to core meaning, effect metonymy, contextual metonymy, and constituent metonymy.