In English, we have phrasal verbs such as look into, make up and stand out. Does Thai language have a similar category of words as well?

Hmm... Thai may be developing some. Verb phrases like นำเข้า "import" and ส่งออก "export", where the object would typically come in the middle ส่ง(สินค้า)ออก, now constructions like ส่งออก(สินค้า) or นำเข้า(สินค้า) are cropping up.

From DHL's Thailand website: บริการนำเข้าสินค้าด่วนระหว่างประเทศ "express international (goods) import service"

Also, for "importer", there's the (expected) phrase ผู้นำสินค้าเข้า, which gets only a few hundred Google hits, versus 40,000 for ผู้นำเข้าสินค้า.

One thing Thai has in abundance, though, is so-called "serial verb constructions", like ฉันรีบเดินหนี "I quickly walked away" -- where รีบ เดิน and หนี are verbs in a row, stacking together the events of hurrying, walking, and escaping into a single event.

(This should be distinguished from the use of verbs in special grammaticalized roles, such as ไป, มา, อยู่, ขึ้น, ลง, จาก, etc., which can give the appearance of very long strings of verbs in Thai.)

Edited October 6, 200817 yr by Rikker

เห็นด้วย is also one, and a universally accepted one at that. Anyone else care to add to the list?

Edited October 7, 200817 yr by Rikker

In English, we have phrasal verbs such as look into, make up and stand out. Does Thai language have a similar category of words as well?

Maybe I am not clear on the concept but it seems to me that these expressions are very common in Thai. Some examples:

ลุกขึ้น - to stand up

นั่งลง - to sit down

ยืนขึ้น - to stand up

ขึ้นอยู่กับ - to depend on; to be decided by

ลาออก - to resign (from a job, for example)

There are also multi-verb combinations such as

วิ่งหนี - to run away from

ตื่นนอน - to wake up (from sleeping)

Is this what you have in mind?

I was taking phrasal verb to mean verb+preposition that functions as a single semantic unit, and usually has a novel meaning, like how "put off" and "make up" aren't decipherable from their component parts.

I didn't think -ขึ้น and -ลง expressions would count, because they modify the verb by adding direction to the action, but the meaning of the verb is the same.

But then, my understanding of phrasal verb isn't complete, either. The definition given in this Wikipedia article I just found is broader than I thought. It includes a section "Literal usage" which includes things like "look up" and "walk across".

So เห็นด้วย, ขึ้นอยู่(กับ) and แล้วแต่ seem like clear examples of phrasal verbs with novel meanings, "idiomatic" phrasal verbs. And I think นำเข้า and ส่งออก that I mentioned above probably also count because they are used as a single syntactic/semantic unit, and the preposition moves in front of the object.

So based on the broader definition, these are all over the place.

Very interesting topic!

Edited October 7, 200817 yr by Rikker