The relationship between definiteness theories and nominal expressions in Thai narratives
Nimit Kumwapee, Nattanun Chanchaochai · 2023
This objective of this study is to 1) propose the definiteness rankings of Thai nominal expressions according to different definiteness theories and 2) examine the correlation between different definiteness theories with regards to the definiteness degrees of different types of nominal expressions. This study examines the relationship between 16 types of Thai nominal expressions and four definiteness theories (Uniqueness, Familiarity, Identifiability, and Accessibility), analyzing 6,007 nominal expressions from Thai-Zlatev Corpus, Aakanee Website, and Thai Folktale Database. The distributional patterns with respect to Uniqueness, Familiarity, and Identifiability shows that zero pronouns tend to denote unique, familiar and identifiable entities while nominalization is associated with non-unique, unfamiliar, and unidentifiable entities. As for Accessibility, pronouns and zero pronouns are used when the Accessibility of the antecedent is high. Conversely, possessive phrases and nouns with relative clauses are associated with low Accessibility. In addition, the analysis about the correlation between definiteness theories show that Uniqueness, Familiarity, and Identifiability exhibits a strong correlation as reflected in the congruence between definiteness properties, mixed-effects model estimates and definiteness ranking, with Uniqueness and Identifiability exhibiting the strongest correlation. On the other hand, Accessibility shows a weak correlation with Uniqueness and Identifiability due to the difference from categorical and graded representation of definiteness.