“Bully” in Thai context: A Semantic Componential Analysis

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the semantic components of the word “bully” as an English loanword in Thai. The data is collected from the contextually situated text: news on the most visited news & media website in Thailand, sanook.com/news. The findings have shown that semantic components of the word “bully” in Thai news are composed based off two criteria: subject matters and contexts other than subject matter. The word “bully” in Thai news still retains the two main ideas of bullying: imbalance of power and consistency of bullying behavior. However, the subject matter composed as the essential senses of the word “bully” is a far cry from how the word “bully” is referred to an act of bullying in the western world. There are some localized semantic components of the word “bully” in Thai news, used to fit the mainstream norms in the Thai society.