SinhalaSinhala 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
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 |
286 | |
292 | |
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Common terms and phrases
added addressee adjectival form adjectives ęti agent amma anaphoric animacy animate appear Appuwa atin auxiliary base form be-ind benefactive construction causee child Chitra compound consonant context dative deictic deictic expressions deixis demonstrative denote direct object discourse distal dunna embedded clause event expressions eyaa father focus form focused following examples function Gair gatta giyaa go-ind grammatical head noun hearer imperative Imperative Mood inanimate indicate Indo-Aryan languages inflect interrogative intransitive involitive lameya language lauwa linguistic locative main clause marked marker miniha modal morpheme morphological causative nęę naŋ nasal nominal constituents non-past noun phrase numeral occur ofthe oonę oyaa participant particle passive past tense perfect participle phonological plural position postposition pragmatic Pred.VP Ranjit Ranjit-dat referent reflexive verbs relation relative clause represent semantic sentence Sinhala speaker Sri Lanka stem structure subordinate clause suffix syllable syntactic taatta tatsama tive topic topic-comment transitive transitive verbs volitive vowel word