Abstract:
To examine the morphological status of the lexical patterns in Thai that correspond to infixation processes in Khmer from the 13th century CE to the present. By comparing phonological and functional relations between words and word pairs showing lexical patterns resembling Khmer infixation, this study finds that the morphological status of the lexical patterns from the 13th century CE to the present do not show two important characteristics of morphological processes, namely regularity and productivity. With respect to regularity, no clear phonological and functional relations exist. As for productivity, vocabulary items showing the lexical patterns are all from Khmer, indicating that the patterns cannot productively apply to words in Thai. Therefore, this study shows that the lexical patterns corresponding to Khmer infixation are not morphological processes in Thai, neither morphological borrowing from Khmer nor analogy in Thai, the patterns are originated from Khmer lexical borrowing.