Spirit Medium’s House in Thailand: Grammatical Relations and Classification according to Semantics Field in Naming ตำหนักทรงเจ้าในประเทศไทย: ความสัมพันธ์ทางไวยากรณ์และการจำแนกตามกลุ่มความหมายในการตั้งชื่อ

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Published: Jun 1, 2022
Keywords:
grammatical relations semantics field naming spirit medium’s house

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Siravast Kavilanan
Assistant Professor Dr., School of Liberal Arts, University of Phayao
Poonpong Ngamkasem
Associate Professor, School of Liberal Arts, University of Phayao
Phattharaphong phonphot
Undergraduate students, School of Education and School of Liberal Arts, University of Phayao

Abstract

Spirit mediumship is a belief that has been associated with Thai society for a long time. In 2021, there are 108 spirit medium’s houses in Thailand. These spirit medium’s houses have different and unique names. This research aimed to study the grammatical relations and classification according to semantics field in naming of the spirit medium’s houses in Thailand. The data of 108 spirit medium’s houses were collected from Google Maps. The results of the analysis of grammatical relations revealed that the names of 27 spirit medium’s houses had a general structure, accounted for 25.00% of the total name lists. The syntactic hierarchy of complexity between the head nouns and the noun modifiers ranged from 2-4 syntactic hierarchies, in descending order as follows: 52 names with 2-syntactic hierarchy of complexity (48.15%); 22 names with 3-syntactic hierarchy of complexity (20.37%), 7 names with 4-syntactic hierarchy of complexity (6.48%). When the semantics field was classified, it was found that the head nouns consisted of kinship terms the most, showing the relationships among the sacred things and the owners of the spirit medium’s house and the people having faith in them. The noun modifiers contained the names of sacred things the most and had a more complex structure than those in the head nouns. This indicated that the noun modifier is the part that identifies or reveals the identity of sacred things as well as expressing their power or charisma. Therefore, it points out that although Thai society has Buddhism as the main religion, there are beliefs and faiths in the sacred things in “Brahmin-Hindu” and “sprit” cults, traditional beliefs that perfectly go together in Thai people’s way of life.

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Issue
Vol. 13 No. 1 (2022): January - June
Section
บทความวิจัย (Research Article)
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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