Das deutsche Kopulaverb sein und seine thailändischen Entsprechungen

Abstract

Although German and Thai are typologically different from each other, both languages do have copulative constructions. The verb sein is the most important copular verb in German. Thai does have literary equivalents for this German verb but they involve different verbs. However, only pen and khɯ: are usually considered as Thai copular verbs. This study aims to compare the German verb sein in copulative constructions with pen and khɯ:. The contrastive analysis is based on a bidirectional parallel corpus consisting of 12 Thai and 13 German contemporary short stories and their translation into the other language. Three questions are to be answered: 1) Which forms are found in Thai as equivalents to the German copular verb sein? 2) Which linguistic elements in German occur as equivalents of the Thai copulative constructions with pen and khɯ:? 3) How can the use of copular verbs in German and in Thai be described? The results of this study show that the equivalents of the German copulative constructions with sein are not only pen and khɯ: but also many other constructions. At the same time, the Thai copular verbs are often used differently and may be expressed in various German constructions and, especially in form of punctuations.