Discourse structure and Strategies in the Fortune telling of Tarot Fortune tellers in Thai

Abstract

This article aims to study the discourse structure and the linguistic strategies in the fortune telling of tarot fortune tellers in Thai. The data is elicited from fortune telling of tarot fortune tellers on YouTube. Total of 36 video clips broadcast in 2020 – 2022, each clip is approximately 20 - 30 minutes. The results of the study found that the discourse structure consists of 7 main structure components 1) Greetings 2) Telling the topics 3) Fortune telling a present of listener’s life 4) Fortune telling a future tendency 5) Giving an idea 6) Encouraging and 7) Farewell. The linguistic strategy consists of 8 strategies, including 1) lexical selection about astrology 2) using affirmative speech 3) using non-affirmative speech 4) modality 5) using tarot-voicedness 6) questioning 7) reasoning and 8) using conditional sentence. In terms of function, those strategies are used for various communication goals. The results of this article will reveal the discourse structure and linguistic strategies that reflect the characteristics of the tarot fortune telling in Thai.