ภาษาศาสตร์ภาษาอังกฤษ

The study aims to investigate the similarities and differences between nominal synonyms people and persons focusing on collocations and semantic preferences. The data are drawn from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (online version) and the original British National Corpus. The results of the study demonstrate that the two nouns share five statistically significant collocates and five semantic preferences including health, age, employment status, socioeconomic status, and thoughts and feelings. However, they also display distinctive semantic preferences. While people shows semantic preferences for negative actions, numbers, and ethnicity words, persons frequently collocates with words from the semantic set of legislation. The analysis of collocations and semantic preferences also confirms a high degree of formality of persons as indicated in the dictionary. Even so, the corpus data show that despite a high degree of formality, persons is not restricted to formal contexts but can also be used in informal contexts such as fiction.

A growing body of research examines attitudes towards English varieties from an impressionistic perspective, but relatively few studies investigate attitudes towards specific standard and variant grammatical features. This study explores the language attitudes of Thai university students and teachers towards standard grammar and its variation in present-day English. The study adopted an online questionnaire which consisted of 15 pairs of sentences, with each pair containing two corresponding grammatical forms: standard and variant. Respondents chose standard and/or variant forms and provided reasons for their grammar choices. The responses and reasons were analysed using statistical and content analysis methods respectively. The analyses of acceptability responses by 182 students and 182 teachers revealed that the students were inclined to choose variant forms while the teachers were favourably disposed to both standard and variant forms. With respect to reasoning, both groups of the respondents overwhelmingly cited standard grammar rules to justify their preferences. However, they were significantly different in that while the teachers described the variations in grammatical forms, the students employed analogies with similar grammatical patterns. The overall results indicate that the respondents remain influenced by the standard language ideology. The results also suggest that the teachers tend to use their norm-providing roles to regulate standard forms while the students generalise rules of thumb to simplify and regularise prescriptive irregular usages. This article argues that grammar learning and teaching should address language variation and variant linguistic forms from a descriptive perspective.

The aim of this study is twofold: to analyze politeness strategies in the online conversations of Thai students, and to suggest how this analysis can be applicable to pedagogical practice. A corpus of a 21-month instant online conversation among students and teachers has been analyzed. Throughout the time of data collection, the teachers continually encouraged students to use English and French to promote the use of foreign languages that they were learning. The result of statistical analysis showed the relation between speech acts and politeness strategies used in the data. It could be claimed that the students’ language proficiency governed their politeness strategies. As a result, the authors proposed a modification of Brown & Levinson’s (1978) Weightiness formula for non-native speakers of English as: Wx = LP(S) × [D(S,H) + P(H,S) + Rx]. The results also showed that emoticons were used as redressive actions in politeness. Further, interlanguage pragmatics in the data were discussed based on linguistic competency and socio-cultural norms in the participants’ L1. The results suggest that teachers and curriculum developers could better understand students’ communication behaviors and language competency through computer-mediated communication. Finally, we offer suggestions to promote online communication in the context of active learning.

Creating a word list for the beverage services is one method to assist learners in this field to expand their English language vocabulary. The purpose of the current study was to create the Beverage Service Word List (BSWL). Data were collected from www.tasteatlas.com—a website that contains abundant beverage information from all over the world. The Beverage Service Corpus (BSC) was compiled from 1,729 beverage menus with a size of 471,233 tokens. The criteria used in the current study were frequency, range, lexical profiling, and expert consultation. The words included in the BSWL were those which occurred at least 13 times in 30 per cent of menus, were outside the reference word lists (the General Service List, the Academic Word List, the Function Word List, the abbreviation list, and the Proper Name List), and were scaled as 3 or 4 by two or more experts. As a result, the BSWL comprised 288 words with 7.92 per cent coverage of the BSC.

Apart from the fact that there are no fixed rules for writing newspaper editorials, there is no single study incorporating both analyses of moves and stance adverbials in online English newspaper editorials from The Bangkok Post in comparison to those from an international online English newspaper from another country. The aims of the present study include 1). exploring the move structure of editorials from The Bangkok Post and The New York Times, 2). finding stance adverbials in each move, and 3). identifying the positions of the stance adverbials found in each move. 60 editorials from 2017 to 2019 with the length of 550-700 words whose purpose is to call for action were selected from each newspaper archive. A list of stance adverbials and a proposed move structure were employed for identifying the moves and stance adverbials. ANTCONC was used as a tool for counting the frequencies (converted into percentages and normalized frequencies afterwards) and identifying the positions of stance adverbials. In both corpora, most of the editorials contain the sequence of Move 1-Move 2-Move 3-Move 4 (1234 or MS1). Furthermore, other outstanding move sequences include Move 1-Move 2- Move 3- Move 2-Move 3- Move 4 (123234 or MS2) and Move 1-Move 3- Move 2- Move 3- Move 4 (13234 or MS3). Epistemic stance adverbials were found two times more frequently than attitudinal stance adverbials and about seven times more frequently than style stance adverbials. The most prevalent sub-categories of epistemic stance adverbials are doubt/certainty, source of knowledge, and actuality, whereas the most outstanding attitudinal stance adverbials are importance and evaluation. Those showing importance were more frequently used in The Bangkok Post than those showing evaluation, but this is reversed in The New York Times. Whether these findings were influenced by the L1 of the writer, cultural differences, and institutional practices could be carried out in additional research.