Negotiating identities in Thai conversation: A sociolinguistic discourse analysis of person-referring expressions.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the forms, functions, and distribution of words used to refer to self and addressee in a corpus of spoken Thai, integrating an ethnographic analysis of Thai social structure with an account of language variation. Based on participant-observation field work among university students in Thailand, the study describes how male and female speakers of this speech community and age group use personal pronouns and pronominalized nouns in certain speech situations. The data include sociolinguistic interviews, naturalistic conversations, and attitude assessments, including a matched-guise study. The analysis draws upon work in interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, politeness, and discourse analysis, focusing specifically on the effects of speaker gender and discourse factors on patterns of use. Beginning with a description of the first and second person terms used among peers in casual conversations, I attempt to provide an interpretive framework that accounts for both marked and unmarked uses on the basis of strategic choice and discourse structure. Specifically I show that speakers may shift from their unmarked set of person-referring expressions to signal interactional moves such as varying degrees of involvement or distance, or structural features of the discourse such as a shift in perspective, voice, style, or affective stance. The second part of the analysis focuses on self-referring expressions used in interviews with unknown interlocutors. These interviews show that in a socially ambiguous situation, women use a greater range of terms than men, and they also use overt first person pronouns less frequently than men. The explanation for this considers the interaction of social factors and pragmatic constraints on the grammar of self reference in Thai. The final part of the analysis discusses speakers' attitudes toward and awareness of variation in the use of person-referring expressions. The attitude evaluations highlight links between language ideologies and the use of person-referring expressions and show how gender roles inform notions of politeness and appropriateness. This study contributes a crucial non-western perspective to our understanding of the linguistic resources speakers use to construct personal and social identity, and furthers our understanding of the roles of women and concepts of self in Thai society.