Some observations about Thai synonymous compounds from the BEST 2009 corpus

This research aims to analyse Thai synonymous compounds appearing in the BEST 2009 corpus in order to find out their structure. We selected only synonymous compound words which appear 100 times and more to analyse in 3 aspects: number of constituents, parts of speech and formation. The results show that Thai synonymous compounds comprised of 1-4 morphemes, 2-4 and 6 syllables and are categorized into 4 parts of speech and 16 POS structures. Moreover, the verb + verb structure and the synonymous compounds with same consonant sound and identical meaning appear most frequently. This research can be applied to a synonymous compound extracting machine to produce a synonymous compound dictionary.