16.2546, Review: Lang Desc/S Asian Lang: Iwasaki&Ingkaphirom (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2546. Fri Sep 02 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2546, Review: Lang Desc/S Asian Lang: Iwasaki&Ingkaphirom (2005)

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1)
Date: 02-Sep-2005
From: Richard Todd < irictodd at kmutt.ac.th >
Subject: A Reference Grammar of Thai 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 20:11:42
From: Richard Todd < irictodd at kmutt.ac.th >
Subject: A Reference Grammar of Thai 
 

AUTHOR: Iwasaki, Shoichi; Ingkaphirom, Preeya
TITLE: A Reference Grammar of Thai 
SERIES: Reference Grammars 
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-406.html 

Richard Watson Todd, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, 
Bangkok

SUMMARY

'A Reference Grammar of Thai' describes itself as "a clear and 
comprehensive guide to Thai grammar, designed for intermediate to advanced 
learners" and "an invaluable resource for linguists". The book is 
therefore aiming at two markets: language learners and linguists.

As with most reference grammars, 'A Reference Grammar of Thai' consists of 
a large number of fairly short chapters, each focusing on a specific 
aspect of the language. There are, in fact, 30 chapters starting with an 
introduction, going on to traditional grammatical categories such as noun 
phrases, demonstratives and adjectives, followed by aspects unique to Thai 
including the challengeability marker and the linking particle, and 
finishing with more functionally-oriented issues such as causatives and 
benefactives. Although the book claims that "it places a special emphasis 
on functional accounts", these only come to the fore in the second half of 
the book.

Each chapter follows roughly the same pattern. There is an introduction to 
the grammatical aspect focused on in the chapter using examples from 
English to help non-linguists gain a grasp of the content of the chapter. 
There are then a series of sections, organised either by different ways of 
expressing the same function or by different uses of the same word or 
phrase. Each section has a usually brief explanation and three or four 
examples. These examples consist of four lines: the Thai orthography, a 
phonetic transcription, a gloss, and an English translation. Over half of 
the examples come from natural (as opposed to constructed) data with the 
majority of these being spoken data. Finally, there are two useful indexes 
to the book, one of grammatical terms and one of Thai words.

EVALUATION

In reading 'A Reference Grammar of Thai', I was taking primarily the 
perspective of an advanced learner of the language, the main target 
audience for the book. From this perspective, the indexes are very helpful 
and it is easy to find some useful basic information about aspects which a 
learner may be interested in.

However, most of the chapters provide only basic information. There are 
only four or five chapters which provide sufficiently detailed 
explanations to satisfy the needs of most learners (the chapter on 
passives is one excellent example). In general, much useful information is 
obliquely referred to but not explained. For example, discussing the 
speech-level particle 'ca', the authors temptingly say that "female 
speakers use [this particle] more frequently, though male speakers may use 
[it] in certain situations", but give no indication of the types of 
situations in which male speakers may use the particle. Indeed, pragmatic 
issues of choice are largely ignored with only a few limited aspects 
discussed in the final chapter on discourse.

Similarly, from a learner's perspective, the dearth of non-examples (or 
unacceptable sentences) is unhelpful. For a learner, it is often just as 
important to know what cannot be said as to know what can be said. As a 
learner, then, I would have preferred to see maybe two examples 
illustrating some aspect of language together with a non-example, rather 
than the current three or four examples all showing the same feature of 
language.

Also of concern for learners is the reliance on technical terms and 
phrasing in the explanations. Although helpful illustrations of the main 
points of each chapter are given, the language used in explanations is 
often daunting for the non-specialist. For instance, not many non-
linguists are going to feel comfortable with sentences such as "the 
normative form of the resultative potential is the negative form".

More worryingly, there are quite a few mistakes in the book. Some of these 
are proofreading mistakes, such as a whole clause missing from the Thai 
orthography in one example and inappropriate features underlined in the 
phonetic transcriptions of other examples. There are also misspellings in 
the Thai (for instance, 'Pim' as a name does not have a final silent 'p'). 
More seriously, the book also contains some misinformation. Discussing 
benefactives, in one of the few non-examples in the book, a sentence is 
identified as unacceptable because of an inappropriate use of the 
word 'hay'; later in the same chapter, the same example is revived, this 
time stating (incorrectly) that 'hay' can be used in the sentence. 
Elsewhere, the word for chair, 'kaw-ii', is incorrectly identified as a 
possible classifier. Finally, and with potential for litigation, it is 
stated that the Thai slang for condom, 'miichay', is derived from the 
first name of Michay Ruchupan, a Thai senator; while 'miichay' does 
originate in a person's name, the source is actually Michay Viravaidya, a 
prominent social activist.

>From the perspective of a Thai-language linguist, the emphasis placed on 
spoken language in the book, and especially on conversation, is useful. As 
with most languages which have a written form, previous work on Thai has 
focused largely on the written language, and it is pleasant to see a 
reference grammar which explicitly attempts to redress this bias. However, 
somewhat strangely, many of the examples of natural conversation data come 
from Thais living in the U.S., and in these examples, English words are 
frequently inserted into Thai sentence structures. The main reason for 
including these examples appears to be simply ease of access to the data - 
not a very persuasive reason for a book which appears to want to set 
itself up as the benchmark in the field.

Even with this focus on spoken language, 'A Reference Grammar of Thai' 
does not include anything that would be new to a linguist specializing in 
the Thai language. This, however, should not be viewed as necessarily 
being a bad thing. The purpose of a reference grammar is not to present 
new research; rather, it is to collate and collect the findings from 
previous research into one comprehensive volume. Generally, for those 
aspects of the language that are covered, the book under review does do 
this well if briefly, although the information on discourse is severely 
limited and ignores a lot of work published in Thai-language publications.

There are, however, a multitude of areas which could have been included in 
the volume but were not. I realise that restrictions of space mean that 
tough decisions on what to include may have had to be made, but the lack 
of any real worthwhile analysis of written Thai represents a serious 
deficit. The book should perhaps be titled 'A Reference Grammar of Spoken 
Thai'.

A lack of coverage of some key aspects of spoken language, such as 
ellipsis, may be due to attempts to make the description of Thai in this 
book comparable to descriptions of other languages. In deciding on 
categories to form the chapters organising the book, preference has been 
given to the traditional linguistic categories which historically have 
been applied in much of linguistics with only a few chapters reserved for 
the peculiarities of Thai. While this allows linguists of other languages 
to compare their languages with Thai easily, it may not really be the most 
appropriate approach. At times in reading the explanations, there is a 
feeling that the authors are having to shoehorn Thai into the mould of 
traditional categories of linguistic description. This may be due partly 
to the nature of Thai as a language and partly to the emphasis placed on 
spoken language in the book. For the latter, traditional categories can 
result in convoluted descriptions. For example, spoken Thai is a highly 
elliptic language but traditional categories of linguistic description may 
restrict the treatment of ellipsis as a grammatical phenomenon to the use 
of zero anaphora. While zero anaphora are covered briefly in the book, 
other aspects of Thai could also be usefully discussed in terms of 
ellipsis. One instance concerns oblique nominals, as in the example "She 
fell the horse's back". The authors laboriously argue that "the horse's 
back" should be considered as a direct object rather than using the far 
more parsimonious explanation of preposition ellipsis.

In writing 'A Reference Grammar of Thai', then, the authors appear to have 
been torn between fulfilling the demands of mutually incompatible 
audiences. On the one hand, meeting the needs of general linguists has 
reduced the value of the book for Thai-language specialists. On the other, 
producing a linguistics reference book means that the finished product is 
not as helpful to learners as it should be. This does not mean that 'A 
Reference Grammar of Thai' is not going to be a useful addition to the 
shelves of most libraries and learners; indeed, the book usefully fills a 
gap in the literature on Thai. However, the weaknesses of the book mean 
that it is unlikely to become a classic, either for learners of Thai or 
for linguists. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER


Richard Watson Todd has been living in Thailand for the last fifteen years 
and is still struggling to learn the language. Working at King Mongkut's 
University of Technology Thonburi in Bangkok, most of his research and 
publications concern English language teaching and applied linguistics 
with a particular focus on classroom discourse.





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