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Pain Language: a Thai Case Study

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Pain Language: a Thai Case Study THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND COMPARATIVE CULTURAL STUDIES Pain language: A Thai case study SLAT 7853 Investigator: Patharaorn Patharakorn Supervisor: Professor Roland Sussex A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Master of Applied Linguistics (Undeclared), June 2010 SLAT 7853 i Statement of authorship Patharaorn Patharakorn STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I declare that the materials in this thesis have not been submitted either previously or concurrently in the whole or as part of requirements for a degree to the University of Queensland or any other educational institution. I also certify that the work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original to me, Patharaorn Patharakorn, except as acknowledged in the text. Any aid that I have received during the preparation and completion of this thesis has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all the information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. Patharaorn Patharakorn Date: ___________________________________ Signature: ______________________________________________ SLAT 7853 ii Acknowledgements Patharaorn Patharakorn ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude for my supervisor, Professor Roland Sussex, who has not only supervised me, with patience, through the making of this dissertation, but also provide useful professional guidance and support. I would like to also thank, again, Professor Sussex, Dr. Iwashita, Dr. Harrington and all my instructors at the University of Queensland for their well-rounded knowledge and passion for their specialised subjects. Not only you are my teachers, you are also a role model for my future teaching career for which I will be forever thankful. I would like to also thank the members of Thai Student Association at the University of Queensland (UQTSA) for their kind cooperation on my research. Without your help, this project would have never been possible. I would also like to thank my friends at the University of Queensland for their support and companionship during the writing of my dissertation. A special thanks to Tina Pentland for her lecture notes, books, and especially her kindness to me. Special thanks go to Sujin and Jessica for discussions on my drafts and for providing excellent feedback. I would like to also thank my Friday-dinner companions, Naoko, Yumi, and Benn who always brought positive thoughts and encouragement to the table. Also, thanks to Sumaya, Kelly, Yuri, Ju, Grace (Mui), and Andrea for being beautiful, considerate and kind, I could not have persevered through this process without your encouragement. Most importantly, I want to thank my parents, my family and my best friend for your faithful belief in me, even for the time that I did not believe in myself. I could not ever thank you enough for your unconditional love and support. I would not strive to be a better person, if I have not wanted to make you proud. SLAT 7853 iii Abstract Patharaorn Patharakorn ABSTRACT This research is a case study which investigates how pain is verbally expressed (henceforth „pain language‟) in Thai. Given the subjective and private nature of pain, people have to rely to a significant degree on language as a tool to communicate this unpleasant experience to others. However, with a few exceptions linguistics and applied linguistics have almost entirely ignored this area of study, and the work which has been very much dominant in the study of pain language is the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ), which is a lexical test instrument developed primarily from the medical and clinical perspectives. The present study, therefore, offers a complementary perspective and new evidence to understanding the MPQ from the viewpoint of applied linguistics. It aims at finding out (1) whether the Thai- MPQ is recognisable for Thai native speaker, (2) and how Thai language construes pain experiences based broadly on Halliday‟s functional linguistics framework. Thai is the researcher‟s native language, and the present research is a case study of evidence drawn from pain language data in Thai. To elicit a written description for a recollected painful experience, 45 Thai students studying in an Australian university completed a questionnaire. Among this group of participants, ten students also provided data for Thai pain language in spoken use. The data was transcribed and then analysed using the Thai Concordance package. The findings show that Thai-MPQ word list is a poor fit for pain language communicated in Thai, due to the internal inconsistencies between some of the Thai versions and the conventional understanding of pain in Thai, and also the macro-level incompatibility between the construal of pain in Thai and the original version of MPQ in English. It is also evident that Thai pain language relies heavily on the use of verbs, with 77 percent of the utterances – unlike English – framing pain as a process. Among many verbs, the two most often occurring items are เจ็บ /ʨep/, which denotes a kind of pain that is focussed, and of SLAT 7853 iv Abstract Patharaorn Patharakorn which the cause is visible, and ปวด /puad/, which denotes a kind of pain that is dense, continuous, and resides deeper inside the body. This reveals that pain in Thai language has been viewed as an active and dynamic process with the speaker‟s self being highly involved directly in the process itself, which is a key factor affecting how Thai speakers communicate their pain in authentic Thai settings as well as in intercultural bilingual contexts between Thai and English. SLAT 7853 v Table of contents Patharaorn Patharakorn TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………ii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………….iii Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………. 1 1.1 Statement of issues 1 1.2 Purpose of the study 2 1.3 Explanations of key terms 4 Chapter 2: Literature review………………………………………………………….…... 6 2.1 Pain language as an academic question 6 2.1.1 “Philosophical Investigation”: Wittgenstein‟s argument 6 2.1.2 Clinical perspectives and the MPQ 8 2.1.2.1 McGill Pain Questionnaire 9 2.2 Language and linguistics perspective on the language of pain 12 2.2.1 Cross-linguistic investigation 12 2.2.2 Halliday systemic functional account of pain language 15 2.2.3 Lascaratou and her argument on the language of pain 18 2.3 Pain language in Thai 20 2.3.1 Multiple terminologies for pain in Thai 20 2.3.2 Towards “fuzzy-set” theory 22 2.3.3 The lack of nominal primary pain terms 22 2.4 Conclusion 23 Chapter 3: Methodology…………………………………………………………………….24 3.1 Introduction 24 3.2. Participants 24 SLAT 7853 vi Table of contents Patharaorn Patharakorn 3.3. Data collection methods 25 3.3.1. Data Collection Instrument 27 3.3.2. Data collection procedure 29 3.4. Data analysis methods 30 Chapter 4: Findings and discussion………………………………………………….........33 4.1 Survey results of the Thai-MPQ word list 33 4.1.1 Discussion 34 4.2 Result on the Thai pain lexical items and collocations 36 4.2.1 Discussion and interpretation of lexical data 38 4.2.1.1 Collocation with parts of body 39 4.2.1.2 Collocation with kinds of pain 40 4.2.1.3 Collocation with degrees of pain 46 4.2.1.4 Collocation with causes of pain 47 4.3 Sentence-level analysis of Thai pain language 47 4.3.1 Pain as a process in Thai 49 4.3.1 Pain as a participant in Thai 52 4.4 Conclusion 54 Chapter 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...56 5.1 Summary 56 5.2 Suggestions for future studies 58 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..….60 Appendix A: Adapted Thai version of pain language questionnaire………………………...64 Appendix B: The set of potentially painful pictures for the data collection…………………70 Appendix C: Full list of words and phrases classified into groups of verbs, nouns, and adjectives/ adverbs…………………………………………………………………………...76 SLAT 7853 vii List of tables and figures Patharaorn Patharakorn LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 2.1 Fabrega and Tyma‟s pain language analysis: A comparison of between English, Japanese, and Thai………………………………………………………………………...…13 Table 2.2 Summary of Halliday‟s pain language framework in terms of English lexicogrammar……………………………………………………………………………..…17 Table 2.3 Nominal constructions of “pain” in Lascaratou‟s The Language of Pain……….19 Table 2.4 Comparison of Thai pain terms with their definitions from two studies………….21 Table 4.1 Percentages of participants indicating that they used Thai-MPQ items in describing pain…………………………………………………………………………….…33 Table 4.2 Percentages of participants indicating that they heard the Thai-MPQ items in describing pain…………………………………………………………………………….…34 Table 4.3 Distribution of Thai words and phrase into groups of verbs, nouns, and adjectives/adverbs………………………………………………………………………...….36 Table 4.4 Key lexical items and their corresponding frequencies from the collected set of data………………………………………………………………………………………...…37 Table 4.5 Typical collocation and their co-occurrences with each of the pain verbs……….38 Table 4.6 Top 10 adverb modifiers on the quality of pain………………………………..…41 Table 4.7 Metaphors for the nominal forms corresponding to Thai key lexical items………43 Table 4.8 The construal of pain in Thai……………………………………………………..48 Figure 2.1 Spatial display of pain descriptors from Melzack and Torgerson (1971)………10 Figure 2.2 An English example illustrating different types of element construed by grammar…………………………………………………………………………………...…16 Figure 2.3 Functional continuum of pain utterances………………………………………..19 SLAT 7853 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Patharaorn Patharakorn CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This chapter begins with a brief introduction select key issues in research on pain language (1.1). The second section addresses the goals of the present study (1.2). Finally, all the key terms are presented in order to facilitate the understanding of the whole study (1.3). 1.1 Statement of the issues Enquirers new to the field of pain language often ask first what it is, and why it is important.
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