Abstract:
This dissertation aims to analyze the relationship between the prosodic structure and the degree of lexicalization of Thai compound words. Data were collected from the syllable duration ratio which is an acoustic correlate of word-level prosodic structure and word stress in Thai, with three quantitative lexicalization indicators including semantic compositionality which reflects degree of sematic changes collected from speakers judgment using the compositionality rating questionnaire, reaction time from lexical decision task which indicates the degree of change in morphosyntactic structures, and frequency of use from corpus which indicates the degree of change in usage. The results showed that the prosodic structure of compound words correlated with the degree of lexicalization as hypothesized. More lexicalized compounds consisted of a single prosodic word realized as secondary-primary stress pattern similar to monomorphemic words. On the other hand, less lexicalized compounds consisted of two prosodic words with primary stresses on both syllables like syntactic phrases. The results suggested that, as compounds were lexicalized, the multiple prosodic words fused into a single unit. They also suggested that the duration ratio decreased along with the change in the prosodic structure.