Deixis in Thai online comments: constructing us-them boundaries in Thai-Cambodian cultural conflicts

Abstract

This article examines the pragmatic functions of deixis in Thai-language social media comments about cultural ownership disputes between Thailand and Cambodia, focusing on how deictic choices index ideology, stance, and national identity. A corpus of 2,834 comments sampled from high-visibility, high-engagement posts from Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok was analysed, of which 1,055 comments (37.22%) contained 1,151 deictic markers. Drawing on Levinson’s typology, the data were analysed within a primarily qualitative discourse-pragmatic framework, supplemented by descriptive frequency counts. Social deixis was the most frequent category (41.88%), followed by person deixis (25.89%), discourse deixis (15.99%), spatial deixis (9.73%), and temporal deixis (6.52%). The findings show that deixis operates as an indexical and ideological resource for helping to accomplish us–them boundary-making rather than merely encoding grammatical reference. Social and person deixis foreground alignment, othering, and moral positioning, while spatial deixis symbolically maps territorial belonging and national affiliation. Discourse and temporal deixis anchor stance-taking within shared events, presupposed narratives, and ideological timelines linking past grievances with present hostilities and future projections. Overall, the study advances discourse-pragmatic accounts of Thai online interaction by demonstrating how deictic indexicality contributes to the production of nationalism, boundary-making, and cultural contestation in these high-engagement comment spaces, and how online hate speech and conciliatory stances coexist within the same interactional field.