Abstract
Abstract The Thai noun cay, roughly ‘heart, mind, disposition’, occurs frequently in informal speech and in literary texts, forming some three hundred compounds that provide Thai speakers with a rich “vocabulary of the emotions”. A number of subtypes of these these “emotion predicates” are distinguished, some showing variation in terms of relative lexicalisation. Related to this are thematic‐role subcategorisations and the problem of whether “superimposed” thematic roles are licensed. These questions, along with constituency issues and the determining of empty categories and their anaphoric linkages in complement constructions, are shown to be related to factors in the compositional semantics of the compounds. For a given cay compound, depending on subtype, there are certain ways in which the heart/mind is typically conceptualised or metaphorically presented; such conceptualisations lie behind construction types organising constituency, anaphoric binding and predicate relations in superficial syntax.
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