Voluntariness And Spontaneity In Thai

By examining the occurrence of Thai verbs in negative, imperative, causative, and passive constructions, this paper claims that the most fundamental semantic contrast in Thai verbs is between voluntariness and spontaneity, rather than between transitivity and intransitivity. On the basis of this semantic distinction, we further assume that the most basic sentence structure in Thai is serial verb construction, which we attempt to analyze linearly, that is, avoiding binary and hierarchical representation. This enables us to determine that the causative and passive constructions are anti-parallel to each other, as entailed in serial verb constructions. Adapted from the source document