Bridging Theory to Empirical Insights: Revisiting Thai Caused-Separation Verbs
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Abstract
Studies of Thai caused-separation verbs elucidate how speakers conceptualize and articulate events involving physical separation. While prior research has examined this verbal domain through both rule-based (henceforth, prescriptive) and usage-driven (empirical) approaches, a systematic comparison between the two frameworks remains lacking. This study aims to bridge the gap by offering the first comprehensive, comparative analysis of Thai caused-separation verbs across prescriptive taxonomies and empirical usage data. Methodologically, it proceeds in two stages: (1) reviewing both prescriptive and empirical accounts of Thai caused-separation verbs, and (2) assessing the degree of convergence or divergence between them in terms of syntactic realization, semantic categorization, and lexical selection. Findings reveal that, although prescriptive models capture certain structural generalizations, they often overlook the contextual and pragmatic variability observed in usage. Thai caused-separation verbs exhibit notable syntactic flexibility—particularly through serial verb constructions—and often display overlapping or fluid categorization shaped by instrument type, object properties, and communicative intent. By comparing theoretical constructs with real-world language usage, this study offers a novel analytical lens, reinforcing the need for a hybrid, probabilistic model of verb categorization that more accurately reflects how Thai speakers select and organize verbs. The results have broader implications for linguistic typology, cognitive semantics, and corpus-based language modeling of syntactic variation and context-sensitive verb use, with applications to Thai lexical resources for language education, lexicography, and natural language processing.
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บทความทุกบทความเป็นลิขสิทธิ์ของภาษาและภาษาศาสตร์
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