Download The Thai c2a: A marker of tense or modality

The Thai c2a1: A marker of tense or modality?
C2a is usually translated as will in English. It also behaves similarly to will
both syntactically and semantically. That is, it occurs before a verb and may combine
with verbs from all aspectual classes. Like will, it can express epistemic necessity and
dispositional necessity and has future time reference. (1) – (3) are given to illustrate
these points. In (1), c2a expresses epistemic necessity. In (2), c2a expresses
dispositional necessity. In (3), c2a has future time reference.
(1) m3ae:I c2a l3a:ngII r3ot y3u:I t1o’:nn3i:II
mother will wash
car PROG now
My mother will be washing the car now.
(2) f3ae:nth3ae:st1ik d1o’t kh3o’m c2a
Fantastic.com
will
d1ai1II th3uaI
can
around
s2ongI
send
’1es ’1em ’1es
SMS
l3o:k
world
Fantastic.com will enable you to send SMS anywhere in the world.
(3) d1u’an n3a:II r3aw c2a m3ai1I y3u:I p1ai1 ’1am3er3ik1a:
month front I
will not
stay go
America
Next month I will not be here. I will go to the US.
While it is frequently argued that will is a modal, and not a tense marker (e.g. Enç
1996), c2a is often classified as a future tense morpheme that can convey absolute
(e.g. Scovel 1970 and Supanvanich 1973), or relative (Kanchanawan 1978,
Muansuwan 2002) future tenses. C2a is also identified as a non-assertive modal
(Rangkupan 2000), an aspect morpheme (Muansuwan 2002) and even a lexical word
meaning ‘intend to’ (Savetamalaya 1988). However, counterexamples can easily be
found to prove against these analyses.
In this paper, I investigate the use of the Thai c2a and propose that it is
modal rather than temporal. It is demonstrated that its future time reference is
implicated rather than inherent and can be cancelled, for example, in the presence of
temporal adverbials that refer to the past and the present. The fact that c2a can almost
always be deleted with no significant change in meaning when it seems to convey
future time reference shows that in most cases it does not temporally contribute to the
proposition in which it occurs. From my data, which consists of news articles,
magazine articles, excerpts from fiction and natural conversations among native Thai
speakers, it is found that c2a expresses different types of modalities. Although it is
also largely optional when it acts as a modal marker, the fact that it is obligatory when
it is used in counterfactuals strongly corroborates the modality of c2a that I propose.
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The Thai transliteration system used here is that which is found in Diller (1996). In summary, vowel
phonemes are transliterated as (high) i, u’, u, (mid) e, oe, o, and (low) ae, a, o’; three diphthongs are ia,
uá, and ua; long vowels are transliterated with a colon; the tone class of each syllable-initial consonant
is specified by numbers 1, 2, and 3; and tone markers are indicated by I and II.
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Finally, I also point out certain problems Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp
and Reyle 1993) faces with representing sentences where c2a is used in the ways
mentioned above. These problems include the insufficiency of lexical and
grammatical information available in a Thai sentence and the context-dependency of
temporal and aspectual information in Thai in constructing the right discourse
representation structure. That is, the presence of c2a in a sentence does not guarantee
the introduction of n < t, a condition DRT uses to refer to futurity, where n stands for
the utterance time, t for the eventuality time and < for temporal precedence, into the
DRS of the sentence. More often than not, the context of interpretation of the
utterance of the sentence has to be taken into consideration. This is in line with
Diller’s (1993: 412) claim that temporal and aspectual interpretation in Thai is usually
‘a matter of contextual interpretation’. This is due to the optional and flexible nature
of temporal and modal markers in Thai.
References:
Diller, A. (1993) Diglossic grammaticality in Thai. In: William A. Foley, ed.
The Role of Theory in Language Description. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
-------. (1996) Thai and Lao Writing. In: Peter T. Daniels and William
Bright (eds.), The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Enç, M. (1996) Tense and Modality. In: Shalom Lappin (ed), The Handbook of
Contemporary Semantic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kamp, H. and U. Reyle. (1993) From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to
Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse
Representation Theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Kanchanawan, N. (1978) Expression for Time in Thai Verb and its application to
Thai-English Machine Translation. Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of
Texas at Austin.
Muansuwan, N. (2002) Verb Complexes in Thai. Ph.D. Dissertation.
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
Rangkupan, S. (2001) Characteristics of Psychological Perspective in Thai Narrative
Discourse. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Buffalo, The State University of
New York.
Savetamalya, S. (1988) A Reanalysis of Auxiliaries in Thai. Working Papers in
Linguistics. University of Hawaii.
Scovel, T. S. (1970) A Grammar of Time in Thai. Ph.D. Dissertation. The
University of Texas at Austin.
Supanvanich, I. (1973) Tenses in Thai. Master’s Thesis. Chulalongkorn
University. [In Thai]
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