WHAT-Questions in Thai: Focusing on Soliloquy-Based Discourse Markers

Abstract

—Although most utterances are other-directed, some utterances are self-directed, e.g., soliloquy. It has been observed that soliloquies and other forms of self-talk that satisfy diverse personal needs are sometimes strategically manipulated so that the utterances, while marked as soliloquy in form, are uttered audibly enough for the discourse participant to hear, in a delicate double play of manipulating the form (i.e., monologue) and the manner of delivery (i.e., interlocutor-orientation). In Thai, a set of interrogative constructions involving the interrogative pronoun àray ‘what’, is typically used in dialogues with intent to pose a question to the addressee, yet with no interrogative illocutionary force by virtue of diverse linguistic and paralinguistic cues. These cues include the absence of interactional particles, the presence of non-interrogative intonational contour, and the absence of paralinguistic cues (e.g., gesture, gaze, etc.) that typically occur with other-directed questions. For these reasons, these discourse markers (DMs) are simultaneously feigned soliloquies and feigned questions. They are used as pause-fillers or markers of emotional stance, such as (negative) surprise, frustration, discontent, disapproval, sarcasm, etc. As has been reported in other languages, such as Korean, these soliloquy-based DMs carry a strong engaging effect on the addressees, despite them being aware that the question is not intended to solicit an answer.