An ethnosemantic study of terms representing anger in southern thai Dialect

Abstract

     There is an agreement among researchers that anger is one of the basic types of emotion. There have been many studies about anger especially in Conceptual Metaphor and Natural Semantic Metalanguage frameworks. Those studies attempted to understand concepts of one or some anger terms in particular languages. Nevertheless, there are very few studies about a system of anger terms that reflect speakers’ world view.This study employed Ethnosemantic approach so as to reveal southern Thai people’s thoughts and world views reflected in anger terms. It aims to analyze the meaning of anger terms in the southern Thai dialect by finding, identifying the basic anger terms and then categorize them using Componential Analysis. The results show that there are five basic anger terms in the Southern Thai dialect: /wip⁴⁵/, /ba:n³⁴/, /mu:n²⁴/, /hut⁴⁵hit⁴⁵/ and /kh:n²¹/^4.The meanings of these basic terms are differentiated by three major dimensions of contrast and it can be concluded that Southern Thai people conceptualize anger in terms of its duration, goal and violence level.