Auto-Part Terms in Thai: a Cognitive Semantic Analysis

This article presents an investigation of Thai auto-part terms in Cognitive Semantics. With at least 1,000 auto-part terms in our data analysis, we argue that the conceptual naming strategy is linguistically effective in understanding auto parts in the Thai culture. Metaphorically, the resemblance operation enhances the degree of lexical richness by enabling the auto-part conceptualization with four source domains: surrounding object, animal, human, and plant. Metonymically, source domains such as shape, function, part, material, position, involved organ, motion, sound and space function in the source-in-target operation, and the category machine/ device appears as a source domain in the target-in-source operation. The article not only verifies and supports the cognitive theory that holds that language is part of the cognitive abilities of humans in general, and thus describes the world as people understand it, but also sheds light on the association to a further pragmatic analysis of implicature.