Abstract:
This research attempts to analyze (1) the context based semantics of the linguistic action verbs (LAVs) occurring in conversational language in Thai novels and (2) the co-occurring of these verbs with different types of sentences. The data were 1,055 tokens of LAVs co-occurring with the sentences found in 9 Thai novels. They consist of 206 LAVs. The semantic study of LAVs is based on the context of communication - context of situation, intention, and context of participants - in Thai culture. The 206 LAVs found in the corpus can be classified into 4 major types of speech act verb (SAV). Each type of SAV is classified into subtypes:1) Assertives (90 LAVs) including of those initiated by the speakers (19 LAVs), not initiated by the speakers (68 LAVs), and those assertives used in interactive management (3 LAVs) 2) Directives (36 LAVs) including Commanding (15 LAVs), Forbidding (6 LAVs), Questioning (15 LAVs) 3) Expressives (79 LAVs) including purely expressives (11 LAVs), expressives plus assertives (56 LAVs), expressives plus directives (5 LAVs), expressives plus interactive management (7LAVs) and 4) Commissives (1 LAV). In the study of the co-occurrence of the sentences with the LAVs, four sentence types were found. They are statement and negative statement sentences, negative sentences, imperative sentences, and interrogative sentences. 80.7% of statement sentences co-occurred with assertives. Negative sentences were found very little mainly they co-occurred with Non-initiated assertives that were mostly answering. Within directives that consist of commanding, forbidding, and questioning it was found that 75.4% imperative sentences co-occurred with commanding, and 60.0% of this type of sentences co-occurred with forbidding. In questioning, 98.6% of interrogative sentences were found. Mainly the sentence type that highly co-occurred with the different types of expressives was statement sentence, i.e., 62.6% in average. In expressives 26.9% of interrogative sentences were found. There were only a few commissives found in the corpus. All of these commissives were in statement sentences. In conclusion from this empirical study, most LAVs that can be classified into different types of SAV co-occurred with the sentence types that are mostly related to them. The sentence types that are not directly related to the SAV types may be because of other pragmatic aspects which need further investigation.