ICLSL 2016
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://repository.kln.ac.lk/handle/123456789/14246
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Item Morphological Characteristics of Sri Lankan English: Some New Observations(Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Thumbowila, T.M.; Ghosh, R.This paper demonstrates how Sri Lankan English (SLE) has a unique lexical repertoire from distinct from other varieties of English used in the Asian subcontinent. It examines the contribution of morphology in developing a lexical database specific to this variety. It focuses on five morphological processes namely borrowing, compounding, abbreviation, affixation and reduplication, which, according to Halliday (2009), are the most significant ones operational in developing the vocabulary of a national variety of a language. The model of morphological analysis adapted in this paper is based on Seneratne (2009) who analysed the morphology of Sinhalese and English code-mixing. This paper includes a process of intense validation and justification of previous claims in the light of a fresh set of exhaustive data collected through a relatively novel means. Whereas Seneratne‟s (2009) data was from a Sinhala-English corpus, the present work uses the online database of the English newspapers published in Sri Lanka. The search engines inbuilt within the websites of the online newspaper archives act almost like a standard corpus and allow the researchers to find appropriate data relevant for research. Lexical data collected through these search engines used for morphological analysis is optimally reliable since they all come from authentic texts written in Sri Lankan English. The representative words collected this way were categorised across morphological processes and registers that they belong to. It is observed that Borrowing in SLE takes place mainly in five domains as the corresponding registers would attest: Educational, Administrative, Industrial, Religious and Cultural. Compounding, on the other hand, is restricted to Industrial, Religious and Cultural domains. Compared to that, Abbreviations abound in the Administrative domain. Affixation and Reduplication are found in almost all domains illustrating the uniqueness of SLE as a distinct variety of English.Item Syntax of Discourse Particles in English Spoken in the Middle East(Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Ghosh, R.The study of Discourse Particles in last two decades or so has brought syntax and pragmatics closely enough towards formulating a non-modular, substantive approach to linguistic analysis. However, its potential in definitive understanding of the issue of syntactic variation and generality in spoken language has not been explored sufficiently. This paper makes an attempt to treat the use of Discourse Particles as one of the factors that distinguishes the local Asian variety of English spoken in Oman from other native varieties of English in the world. It also proposes to extend the application of syntactic theories to analyse the structure of spoken language, where the syntactic products (utterances) are impromptu and are originated in authentic interactions as opposed to conventional syntactic analysis of using the ideal sentences imagined by the linguist. The structure of the paper is divided into three distinct parts. The first part gives an orientation into the literature of syntax of Discourse Particles in some Asian languages such as Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil and Arabic. The common criterion for selecting these languages is that the Asian speakers of English in Oman and the Middle East are mostly bilinguals who speak one of these as the first language and English as a second language. The second part builds up the hypothesis that the Discourse Particles in English spoken by Asian bilinguals in the Middle East are imported as translation equivalents from these languages. It shows how certain discourse particles are sensitive to types of sentences and are restricted to certain speech acts. The third part presents a justifiable classification of the syntactic environments in which Discourse Particles are used. This classification is based on linguistic observation of different syntactic constituents and their corresponding speech acts. The findings are strongly supported by an empirical investigation.