Advertisements, as a distinct register or text type, are characterized by particular patterns of language with underlying meaning of purchasing a promoted product (Toolan, 1988). Thus advertisement is a good example of the creative use of persuasive strategies which can be illustrated through language. This study aims to explore amulet advertisements as examples of persuasive discourse widely found in Thailand. In the Thai context, the advertising of amulets and Buddha images seem prevalent in a wide range of printed media -leaflets, newspapers, magazines, and books. Data for this paper are drawn from three amulet advertisements (collected from March 2005 to March 2007). All of them are taken from Thailand's best selling-printed newspaper -Thairath. The linguistic framework used in this study is Systemic Functional Linguistics, initially developed by Michael A. K. Halliday. Two key aspects of SFL are analysedcontext and lexicogrammar strata. Based on the Thai context, three contextual values -field, tenor, and mode are discussed. In terms of lexicogrammatical analysis, the study will focus on an exploration of three metafunctions -textual, interpersonal, and experiential.

We present the first openly available corpus for detecting depression in Thai. Our corpus is compiled by expert verified cases of depression in several online blogs. We experiment with two different LSTM based models and two different BERT based models. We achieve a 77.53% accuracy with a Thai BERT model in detecting depression. This establishes a good baseline for future researcher on the same corpus. Furthermore, we identify a need for Thai embeddings that have been trained on a more varied corpus than Wikipedia. Our corpus, code and trained models have been released openly on Zenodo.

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This paper aims to illustrate the relationship between documentary linguistics and ethnographic discourse analysis and to explore how language and cultural practices are connected in order to understand the linguistic practices and Black Tai death ritual as a key site of engagement. The Black Tai death ritual is selected in order to present the determined efforts made in maintaining Black Tai ethnic identity through cultural practices. Nexus analysis is introduced and deployed in this research to present the significance of Black Tai’s key communicative activity and social actions involved. In the analysis, the Black Tai death ritual is investigated. The study shows that documentary linguistics makes a noteworthy contribution to understanding the Black Tai’s linguistic and cultural heritage. It reveals that although death rituals are practiced in much the same way as they were in the past, there have inevitably been some significant changes depending on the locations, with specific adaptations and adopted elements based on the surrounding cultures (i.e., Thai culture and religious beliefs) and socio-economic conditions. Black Tai communities are at a settled stage of their death ritual practices by integrating certain aspects of Buddhism into their rituals. In order to construct a modern Black Tai identity among generations, younger generation engagement is challenging but it is essential for the inter-transmission of death rituals. With this dynamic cultural practice, the Black Tai are a good example of an adaptive and diverse ethnic group.

Meetings are one of the common activities that play an important role in the field of business.  For the community of Thai engineers, meetings become the salient aspects of their work, and therefore the effective writing of minutes of meetings is required. As such a writing is essential in the field, analyzing the corpus of the minutes of meetings would shed a light the patterns of meaning instantiated through those minutes.  A corpus of 115 minutes of meetings were collected and analyzed using the genre analysis framework (moves and steps) of Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993), and Thaweewong (2006).  Further, the lexico-grammatical features e.g., tenses and voices instantiated through the meetings were examined. Results of the analysis showed that Thai engineers use e-mail as the medium in writing the minutes in two ways:  using regular e-mail messages (e-mail form) and using the company form. In terms of moves, there were seven common moves observed in the writing of the minutes: (1) the heading; (2) an opening salutation; (3) establishing a correspondence chain; (4) the content of the meeting; (5) a closing correspondence chain; (6) a closing salutation; and (7) attaching a document.  In terms of lexicogrammar, there are some prominent features such as the simple present tense, active voice, noun phrases, proper nouns, abbreviations, and key word lists.  The results above can be further utilized by course designers when developing the materials for their course. It is expected that the knowledge of moves and lexico-gramamtical features can help engineering students and novice engineers practice writing the minutes of meetings effectively.