ICLSL 2017

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://repository.kln.ac.lk/handle/123456789/18326

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Author: search.filters.author.Wijeratne, W.M.

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    Present Tense in Jaffna Tamil and Sinhala –A Contrastive Study:Based on Comrie‟s Point of View.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Senthuran, S.; Wijeratne, W.M.
    The aim of this research is to find out the similarities and dissimilarities between present tense in Jaffna Tamil and Spoken Sinhala languages. This study is significant as tenses are not similar in all languages. Sinhala has two tenses: past and non-past, whereas Tamil has three: present, past and future. According to Comrie‟s views, tenses are of two categories namely, absolute tense and relative tense. Tamil and Sinhala languages have the absolute and relative tense categories. Present tense is under the category of absolute tense. Data were collected from written documents and novels. The sample consists of hundred students from University of Jaffna and University of Kelaniya. Collected data were analysed using structural linguistic method, and descriptive and contrastive analysis methods, taking in to consideration Comrie‟s views on tenses. A number of similarities and dissimilarities between present tense in the two languages are identified. Similarities such as present forms to express future time reference, and both languages having the present tense suffixes and time adverbs to indicate time of an event were highlighted. Further, dissimilarity including the agreement of present tense forms in Tamil with their subject in number, gender and person, unlike in spoken Sinhala were identified. .
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    Developing a Dependency Tag Set for Sinhala: Procedure and Issues.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Liyanage, C.; Wijeratne, W.M.
    Dependency Grammar (DG) is considered as one of the prominent theories of syntax. In order to analyze a particular language on DG and to make an annotated Dependency Treebank, a Tag set is needed. The objective of this research is to compile a Dependency Treebank for Sinhala. As part of compiling, the Treebank a Tagset was developed. This study is designed to explore the procedure and issues of developing a dependency tagset, with special focus to Sinhala Language. Methodology of the study includes 1. Identify same grammatical categories from benchmark tagsets 2. Find out syntactico-semantic categories from traditional Sinhala grammar books 3. Analyze sentences extracted from UCSC Sinhala corpus and further identify grammatical categories 4. Verify the tagset. In literature no reported work has been done based on DG for Sinhala. However, syntactic analysis on other grammatical traditions, Sinhala grammar books and several tagsets were referred in this work. Among the referred tag sets, Stanford typed dependencies manual (Marneffe and Manning, 2016) and AnnCorra: TreeBanks for Indian Languages-Guidelines for Annotating Hindi TreeBank (Bharati et al, 2012) were selected as benchmark tagsets. To ensure uniformity of the tagsets many tags for the same grammatical categories were taken from the above benchmark tag schemas. Findings of the research introduce syntactico-semantic categories and levels of dependency relations of words in Sinhala. The tagset comprises 42 tags and can be used in related works on DG for Sinhala.