Various linguists have examined words which are
traditionally called prepositions in Thai.
Warotamasikkhadit (1992) proposed that there are no
prepositions in Thai. Other linguists maintain that there
remain prepositions in Thai (cf. Savetamalya 1989;
Indrambarya 1995; Prasithrathsint 2000). Words which
appear in the following frame [NP V NP __ NP] have been
widely discussed and classified into various categories:
verbs (Indrambarya 1995), nouns (Savetamalya 1989;
Indrambarya 1995, Prasithrathsint 2000), prepositions
(Indrambarya 1995, Prasithrathsint 2000), adverbs
(Indrambarya 1995) or even conjunctions
(Warotamasikkhadit 1992)
With new findings in recent years, my aim in this
paper is to take a closer look each of the words which
may appear in the above construction. Using precise and
reliable set of syntactic criteria, I can synchronically
identify prepositions in Thai. The data are drawn from
present-day standard Thai corpus. The result shows that
words which may appear in this position may have
homophonous forms and they may belong