On the Development of Adversative BUT in Thai: Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives

Abstract

The notion of ‘contrast’ is among the human perceptual and conceptual primitives since human perception relies on contrast-based categorization (Taylor, 1995, 1989). Disjunctives constitute a grammatical category signaling contrast, and adversative exponents tend to develop into discourse markers (DMs), signaling diverse contrast-related notions crosslinguistically. The Thai DM tɛ̀ɛ and its related forms are polyfunctional across discourse domains (Khammee & Rhee, 2022). A corpus-based analysis of recent developments of tɛ̀ɛ reveals a range of interesting intersubjective and discursive functions, notably that of signaling the speaker’s stance toward the foregoing propositions or utterances. This development, by virtue of the lack of expressed contrast, indicates substantial semantic bleaching from the source and extensive intersubjectification between interlocutors. By deploying the DM tɛ̀ɛ utterance-finally, the speaker signals their tepid, non-committal attitude, whereby foregoing serious comments and statements are suddenly relegated to notions outside the speaker’s concern, thus creating a type of disalignment with the interlocutor’s expectations and a sudden withdrawal of significance of the speaker’s foregoing utterances. Thus, the utterance-final DM tɛ̀ɛ creates a pseudo-self-derogation or pseudo-aloofness, which often induces humorous effects and even laughter. This paper analyzes the development of the DM tɛ̀ɛ and its derivatives from a grammaticalization perspective.