Browsing by Author "Bandara, H.M.S.M."

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    The Impact of Tamil Lexicon on the Sinhalese Language
    (Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Bandara, H.M.S.M.; Pathmasiri, P.S.S.; de Silva, Y.G.H.S.
    Sinhalese and Tamillanguages are used as official languages in Sri Lanka. It is apparent that both these languages have had a great amount of influence on each other. Linguistics borrowing into both languages can be identified as a phoneme for this constant influence. This research discusses the usage ofTamilloan words in Sinhalese language. Data were compiled by observing the speech of Sinhalese native speakers and written documents. According to the findings of this study, it was found out that some of these Tamil loan words have replaced their corresponding Sinhalese words. Further, it is pointed out that in addition to be borrowed, some Tamil words have come to Sinhalese as derived words. According to it is discovered that a great number of Tamil borrowings are used in the Sinhalese language and their origin may not be apparent.
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    The Structure of The Verb phrase in Spoken Sinhala. A Linguistic Study.
    (Faculty of Humanities University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2021) Bandara, H.M.S.M.; Gamage, K.N.
    According to structural linguistics, the structure of a language can be studied as sounds, words, sentences and meaning. Sentences of all languages have both a deep structure which gives the meaning of the sentence, as well as a surface structure which is responsible for the form of the sentence in communication. The deep structure of a sentence can be turned into surface structure by using transformational rules. Hence, Phrase structure analysis becomes essential to recognise the structure of phrases, and to ascertain the inter-structural patterns of languages. The objective of this research is to recognise the structure of the verb phrase in spoken Sinhala. Data for this study is gathered from the book of “Kelani Paalama” written by R.R. Samarakoon. Accordingly, phrase structure rules were used to recognise verb phrases from the collected data. This research applies the theories of generative grammar to analyse the structure of verb phrases. The findings of this study reveal that the verb in which the head of the verb phrase appears can be of various forms such as finite verbs, infinitive verbs, volitive verbs, involitive verbs, transitive verbs, intransitive verbs, helping verbs and main verbs. Verbs behave in the form of reports and commands in a verb phrase, while emphasise and phrase focus may happen in abundance. Furthermore, the word order of Sinhala verb phrase can be observed as a free word order. The study also observed that, simple sentences do not exhibit any change when the deep structure is transformed into surface structure, whereas complex sentences undergo some changes due to transformational rules. Therefore, it can be observed that spoken Sinhala verb phrases have a number of structures, and it is possible to construct verb phrases by incorporating linguistic units such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, determiners, compliments and sentences.