The Use of the Thai Final Particle di by Native Thai Speakers

Abstract

The study aims to analyze communicative functions of the final particle di in Thai National Corpus (TNC) and to investigate the use of di by native Thai speakers. The first part involves the functions of di in the fiction genre of TNC, including to increase an authority, to firm an utterance, to show no interest or dissatisfaction regarding the topic of conversation, and to mark a contradicted topic. These functions are mostly aligned with the communicative functions of si in Maklai (2016). The only difference was that si occurred in the context where a speaker knew what was going on with a hearer. Therefore, it is possible that di is one of the variations of si, and they can be used interchangeably in almost every context. The other part of the study concerns the use of di from 20 native Thai speakers divided into two groups, i.e., 10 males and 10 females. The tool was a role-play of 10 situations, based on the findings in the first part. The results show that there was no difference in the use of di between the two groups. That is, they employed this final particle to serve the two functions: to increase an authority and to firm an utterance. On the other hand, the other two, i.e., to show no interest or dissatisfaction regarding the topic of conversation and to mark a contradicted topic, were not used. These two functions were found with low frequency compared to the prior two functions in TNC, and they appeared in some specific contexts not typically seen in daily communication. Moreover, the gender difference tended to not affect the use of di.