An Investigation of the Focus of Thai University Mottos

Abstract

             Universities in Thailand are now encountering a bad situation since the number of students does not match with the number of the universities. The number of the students that Thai  universities have got in recent years are less than they have expected. This study aimed to investigate the focus of Thai university mottos, used as one of the tools to represent themselves in the people’s mind, by using lexical profiling and semantic tagger. The data were university mottos collected from 82 official websites of the universities in Thailand. AntConc, AntWordProfiler, and Semantic Tagger were used as the research instruments. The results have shown that words used in Thai university mottos were mostly shared with General Service List (GSL), followed by Academic Word List (AWL) while words used in the mottos shared with Business Word List (BWL) were rarely seen. The results have also shown that the first five ranks of the semantic tagsets were [NAME AND GRAMMAR], [GENERAL AND ABSTRACT TERMS], [PSYCHOLOGICAL ACTIONS, STATES AND PROCESSES], [SOCIAL ACTIONS, STATES AND PROCESSES], and [EDUCATION].