| This dissertation is a functional study of various aspects of nominal constructions in Central Thai, including syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, and demonstrates how the syntax of the constructions is motivated or determined by semantics and/or pragmatics and vice versa.;The investigation suggests that nominal constructions in Thai are better viewed and explained as complex bundles of information that designate not only atomic syntax as the unit of grammatical structure but also semantics, pragmatics, and extralinguistic factors (e.g., social, cultural, and historical aspects). Here, such analytical strategy has been found useful in sorting out, distinguishing, and explaining various types of nominal constructions in Thai, especially in the case of structural ambiguities. It happens that noun phrase structures vary due not only to different modifiers (such as relative clauses, quantifiers, possessive phrases, demonstratives, prepositional phrases, and nominal modifiers) but different pragmatic forces as well. It is also found that nominal compounds can be distinguished into synthetic and primary (N-N) compounds which each can be adequately described in terms of both syntactic structures and semantic relationships. Furthermore, nominalizations are found structurally resembling the other nominal constructions and/or functionally overlapping with complementation.;Moreover, the study leads to the idea that syntactic categorizations in Thai, especially categories beyond the less problematic classes (nouns and verbs) should be dealt with by means of gradation, rather than clear-cut categories. The shift of categorical members from one category to another or others involves the process of grammaticalization; a set of strict categories is not informative enough in providing the grammatical description. Words which simultaneously function as independent nouns, prepositions, and/or other syntactic categories in Thai, for instance, are better viewed in terms of diachronically shifting from nouns to other categories or at least in an intermediate stage. |
