คำศัพท์เกี่ยวกับ “การจบชีวิต” - กลวิธีการบ่งบอกความตายของบุคคลต่างสถานะ ในภาษาไทย : ศึกษาจากคลังข้อมูลภาษา

Abstract

Everybody dies someday; it is an immutable truth. Yet it is still painful, scary, and something you wish to avoid at all cost. For this reason, in many different languages, we see considerable usage of euphemisms in an effort to avoid a direct reference to death. With its well-developed honorific system, Thai possesses a rich vocabulary on death, even more so than Korean. Appropriate use of such vocabulary and expressions is, however, not as easy as it appears due to the fact that both the social status and position of the figure whose death is being mentioned and the speaker’s perspective on death are mixed in such statements. That is why a pragmatic approach needs to be taken for the proper use of expressions on death. Recently, the focus is on the corpus linguistic approach as an effective tool for the pragmatic approaches. Thus, this article aims to contribute not only to Linguistics itself but also to language education by examining the corpus to identify the actual use of expressions on death and, based on the collected statistical data, providing a better understanding of the standard of proper usage of such expressions in context. Specifically, this study attempts to furnish the pragmatic standard for learners who study Thai as a foreign language through the investigation of various expressions in Thai related to death and an analysis of the differences between such expressions by inspecting the frequency and examples of the actual language contained in the corpus. I hope to suggest another methodology in the study of languages and foreign language education based on the corpus data.