"กคุ้นหน้า"

[DavidHouston]

I was looking at "คุ้นหน้า" and its sample sentence in Lexitron: " คุ้นหน้า [V] look familiar; be familiar with the face of"

Sample: "เขารู้สึกคุ้นหน้าผู้หญิงคนนี้มาก"

Fairly literally, the sentence seems to mean,

"He feels like he is very familiar with that woman's face."

But, I wonder whether the meaning of the Thai sentence could be extended to become,

"He feels like he recognizes her." [questionable grammar] ; "He feels that he recognizes her."

"She sure looks familiar to him."

"She looks very familiar to him." [but not, "I've grown accustomed to her face", in the words of Alan Lerner.]

It is interesting to note that "คุ้นหน้า" seems to be a verb form in itself, and not a phrase where หน้า is the direct object of "คุ้น". I deduce this because it appears that "ผู้หญิงคนนี้" is a direct object; were it an indirect object, it would have been preceded by a preposition, such as ของ or กับ: ""เขารู้สึกคุ้นหน้าของผู้หญิงคนนี้มาก"

What do you think?

[rakloke]

The word "recognize" means จำ(ใครคนใดคนหนึ่ง)ได้.

Take the clause, "David recognized Nancy at the party." I think David has known Nancy before - knowing some information of who she is. They probably greeted and talked to each other.

But when David "คุ้นหน้า" Nancy.

David may think he has seen Nancy('s face) somewhere a few / several times before. But he doesn't know who she is - no information of hers. They both don't know each other.

Hope this help.

[GarryP]

Her face rings a bell.

[Rikker]

David, there are at least two ways to analyze this grammatically:

1. เขารู้สึก [คุ้นหน้า] [ผู้หญิงคนนี้] มาก

"The woman seemed very familiar to him." (คุ้นหน้า is idiomatic)

2. เขารู้สึก [คุ้น] [หน้าผู้หญิงคนนี้] มาก

"The woman's face seemed very familiar to him." (คุ้นหน้า is literal)

(Forgive the not-very-literal English renderings there.)

I suppose an argument can be made either way. These things are never quite cut and dried. We can make the claim that verb phrases with noun elements are common in Thai. Often in conjunction with a body part--ตกใจ, (or other -ใจ phrases), ขายหน้า, เคยตัว, รู้ตัว, ขาดมือ, เปรี้ยวปาก, but we might also count phrases like เสียความรู้สึก, หยุดงาน, เสียคน. (I'm sure there are better examples, but this is all my brain can come up with at the moment.)

Personally, I tend to prefer the second interpretation, in which คุ้น is the verb and the phrase หน้าผู้หญิงคนนี้ is the object of that verb, for two reasons.

First, the examples I gave of similar constructions seem to always refer to one's own body parts, whereas the หน้า in your example is the woman's.

Second, you can replace หน้า with other aspects of the woman instead of her face--เขารู้สึกคุ้นเสียงผู้หญิงคนนี้มาก, เขารู้สึกคุ้นกลิ่นน้ำหอมผู้หญิงคนนี้มาก, or even leave out หน้า entirely--เขารู้สึกคุ้นผู้หญิงคนนี้มาก. By comparison, you can ตกใจ but you can't ตกตับ or ตกไต. The whole phrase ตกใจ carries an idiomatic meaning, whereas คุ้นหน้า still seems like the literal sum of its parts.

My logic isn't conclusive. So this isn't to say you're wrong. I'm not entirely persuaded on how best to analyze the sentence from a grammatical standpoint.