A Corpus-Based Study of Attitudes towards the Incident of the Thai Cave Boys

Main Article Content

Piyapong Laosrirattanachai
Siriporn Panyametheekul

Abstract

The recent incident regarding the Thai boys trapped in a cave is one that is well known. Not only the incident itself made it well-known but also the successful outcome due to cooperation of people worldwide. The purpose of this study was to analyse the attitudes of Twitter users through the language used in their comments. The corpus containing 16,621 tokens was compiled by collecting the language used in the comments on news of the Thai cave boys from the BBC and CNN official accounts on Twitter.com and analysed using word frequency, keyword analysis, dispersion, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), and Semantic Tagger. The results showed that the matter that the Twitter users mentioned most was “the boys”. Furthermore, when considering the dispersion plots, the words “boys” occurred most across the corpus. This showed that “the boys” was the most interesting issue and also most concerned by Twitter users. The correlation results of LIWC and Semantic Tagger showed that the users had positive attitudes towards this incident. Whatever happens, people from different parts of the world still support each other.

Article Details

How to Cite
Laosrirattanachai, P., & Panyametheekul, S. (2019). A Corpus-Based Study of Attitudes towards the Incident of the Thai Cave Boys. Chiang Mai University Journal of Humanities, 20(3), 97–124. Retrieved from https://so03.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/JHUMANS/article/view/202023
Section
Research Articles
Author Biography

Piyapong Laosrirattanachai, Kasetsart University

Lecturer of Department of Service Industry and Language Innovation, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Science, Kasetsart University, Kamphaeng Saen Campus

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