Sinhala

Front Cover
John Benjamins Publishing, Aug 18, 2010 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 296 pages
Sinhala is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and the mother tongue of over 70% of the population. Outside Sri Lanka it is used among immigrant populations in the U.K., North America, Australia and some European and Middle Eastern countries. As for the genetic relation, it belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Although the earliest surviving literature in Sinhala dates from the 8th century A.D. its written tradition has traced a longer path of more than 2000 years.
Among the major topics covered in this volume are the writing system, phonology, morphology, grammatical constructions and discourse and pragmatic aspects of Sinhala. Written in a clear and lucid style, the book presents a rich sampling of the data and serves a useful typological reference. Therefore this is required reading for not only linguists and Sinhala specialists but also to anyone interested in language, thought, and culture.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Writing system
21
Sounds
28
Words
40
Morphology
66
Morphologysyntax interface
95
Argument structures
100
Noun phrase and verb phrase constructions
129
Expanded sentences
181
Sentence and information structure
207
Discourse and grammar
227
Pragmatics and grammar
254
Sample texts
273
Appendixes
283
References
286
Index
292

Grammatical constructions
152

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