| This dissertation investigates linguistic devices that are used to present psychological perspective in Thai narrative discourse. It focuses on two major issues: those linguistic devices that are used to refer to or evoke participants and those that are used to modify experiential predicates, including epistemology-oriented, affect-oriented, and interaction-oriented marking. The study is based on the Deictic Center Theory that argues that deictic features of a speech situation are transferred into the narrative text. Investigating the data from Thai fictional narratives, the study has found that there are peculiarities of anaphoric expressions, especially pronouns and zeroes, in Thai narrative discourse. Zeroes anaphors in particular are found to occur at a distance that is longer than expected when they occur in a highly perspectivized narrative text. Moreover, epistemological stance markers and affect markers, including adverbs, modals and other interactional particles, often occur accumulatively. This study argues that these linguistic devices are used to construct a character's psychological perspective in the deictic center of narrative discourse. It also shows that pragmatic features of language, are imported from interactional speech into the written form of story telling. A close examination of the use of linguistic coding in statements of private experience also sheds light the reflection of socio-cultural aspects of the language community upon which the narrative-world is built. |
