Sociolinguistic aspects of Thai politeness

This study is an investigation of linguistic politeness phenomena of the Thai language. It presents Thai linguistic data and analyzes it using various techniques, particularly those of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and conversation analysis. The Thai data is compared with American English politeness phenomena and also data from Japanese and Chinese. The theories of H. P. Grice (1975) and Brown and Levinson (1987) are considered against the Thai data.; The work is divided into three conceptual parts. The first part (Chapters 1 through 3) consists of an introduction to the study, a review of earlier works in pragmatics and linguistic politeness to give background to and establish the need for this study, and an explanation of the methodology used here. The second part (Chapters 4 through 13) comprises the bulk of the study and presents the Thai linguistic data, which show how Thai natives achieve politeness in interaction. This part includes an ongoing comparison of Thai politeness phenomena with that of American English, as well as analyses of the Thai data using the theory of politeness proposed by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson. The third and final part (Chapters 14 through 17) analyzes the effectiveness of Grice's model of Conversational Logic and Brown and Levinson's framework for linguistic politeness in regard to the Thai data. This part also builds a picture of the Thai concept of face, which is crucial in understanding Thai behavior.; This research constitutes a comprehensive study of Thai linguistic data focusing on politeness and the Thai concept of face. The theories of Grice and Brown and Levinson are put to the test against these data, and it is demonstrated that neither theory has universal applicability. Moreover, the current work makes the following contributions: it provides politeness data from a non-Indo-European language; it offers a comparison of politeness in Thai and American English; and it provides valuable cross-cultural information to students of Thai as a second language.