Compounding construction in Thai: Its contribution to humor

✍ Scribed by Jaroenkiatboworn, Kanjana

• Book ID: 120501373
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 143 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0933-1719
• DOI: 10.1515/HUMOR.2007.013

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

This paper analyzes some jokes in Thai, which is an isolating language. The focus of this paper is on a linguistic construction, which has high potential for structural ambiguities in Thai, that is, noun compound. The result of this study shows that they are a good resource for constructing two types of ambiguities in Thai jokes: case relation ambiguity, which is the ambiguity of surface realization of case relation, in which a noun or noun phrase can have more than one semantic role, and class ambiguity, which is an ambiguity that causes one word class to be mistaken for another class. As researches on puns in non-inflectional languages are rarely talked of in relation to others, this work might shed light on the study of puns from a new perspective.