In recent years, there has been an extensive literature on the stability of the rest state in linear and nonlinear thermoelasticity. In this paper, it was shown that the equations for a thermoelastic plate are of a parabolic nature, i.e. the linearized problem is associated with an analytic semigroup. This is a surprising result, since an analogous result does clearly not hold for the full equations of thermoelasticity, i.e. the parabolic character of the problem is a result of the approximations made in considering a thin plate. The result allows the application of a broad array of existing abstract results, which immediately yield exponential stability, global well-posedness of the nonlinear problem, smoothness of solutions and other results.