ICLSL 2017
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Item A Study of the Strategies Used by Aphasics in the Retrieval of Words in Their First Language.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Weerasinghe, K. W. A. A. G.Word retrieval difficulty is a characteristic of Aphasia, which is a language impairment that occurs due to brain damage. Stroke is the main cause of brain damage that results in Aphasia. Individuals utilize various strategies to retrieve words in their speech. Finding out the successful strategies used by individuals experiencing Aphasia can be implemented in therapy activities as well as in facilitating communication in daily settings. The specific objectives of the study are to identify strategies used by Sinhala speaking individuals who experience Aphasia when retrieving single words in a picture-naming task, to identify strategies used when retrieving single words during a conversation and to identify the strategies used by the carers to support word retrieval. A descriptive study was carried out in a government hospital Speech and Language Therapy unit on 10 individuals experiencing Aphasia and their carers who were selected through consecutive sampling. Each pair carried out two conversational tasks and a picture-naming task. Video recordings were done of the activities carried out and verbatim translations were made. The strategies were identified which were used in successful retrieval of a predetermined set of nouns. These were analysed using psycholinguistic theories. Four findings emerged as successful strategies used by the individuals experiencing Aphasia, which were fillers, circumlocutions, conduit d‟Approche and gestures. Semantic cues and phonemic cues were identified as strategies used by their carers in facilitating word retrieval. Individuals experiencing Aphasia with word retrieval difficulties can be supported in word retrieval using different strategies, which are self-generated, as well as carer prompted. Carers need advice and training in strategies that can be used in helping word retrieval other than semantic and phonemic cueing.Item Diglossia in the Sinhala Language as a Positive Feature.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Rajapakshe, E.R. M. W.Diglossia is defined as the situation where two very different varieties of a language co-occur throughout a speech community, each with a distinct range of social functions. Sociolinguists usually talk in terms of a High Variety (H) and a Low Variety (L), corresponding broadly to a difference in formality: High Variety is learnt in school, Christian church, Buddhist temple, Tamil Kovil, on radio programmes, in serious literature etc., and as a consequence has greater social prestige whereas the Low Variety is in family conversations, and other formal settings. The Sinhala language, which is spoken in Sri Lanka, is in a diglossic situation where the written variety differs from the spoken variety phonologically, morphologically, syntactically and lexically. Therefore they seem like two different languages. Thus the Sinhala diglossia creates many problems in using the written variety. In fact, students make great effort to learn the written variety and even writers face difficulties in using it. In order to overcome those difficulties the gap has to be minimized as some Sinhala scholars and linguists have proposed. However, there is another aspect of the problem. For instance, the spoken variety is heavily in the cord mixing situation and the final stage of cord mixing is language death. That is the reason for the commonwealth organization to name Sinhala as one of the dying languages in the world. However, the written variety is not changing and the classical Sinhala is preserved there and this study points out that the gap between the two varieties should not be minimized. The written variety should not be changed.Item Stance-Taking in Sinhala Discourse.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Perera, K.Stance – or stance-taking - is a robust area of study in discourse that has been little applied in Sinhala. Stance is the study of linguistic resources used to express the speaker‟s emotions, attitudes, evaluation of and commitment to propositional content (Biber 2006; Schiffrin 1988; Zubair n.d.). Adverbials, verbs and adjectives marking affect and evidentiality, modals and emphatics have been identified as features showing stance in English (Biber 2006). Given the paucity of work on stance in Sinhala (Zubair n.d.), the main aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the linguistic resources used for stance in Sinhala. Additionally, the paper will also describe selected features of Sinhala that are productively used for stance-marking. Assuming that political discourse is a space for exaggerated instances of stance-taking, televised political debates in Sri Lankan media are used for investigation. Approximately six hours of televised spoken data are transcribed and coded for features that show stance-taking. This study shows that Sinhala uses many of the same features that other languages, including English, use for stance-taking, such as adverbials, affect-laden parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives), and discourse markers. Other than such typical features, Sinhala also uses the focused (or cleft) sentences (eya giye: gedara) productively for stance-taking. Since there are few pragmatic studies of focused sentences in Sinhala (Gair and Paolillo, 1997), this study will describe such uses in political rhetoric. In addition, Sinhala also uses quasi-verbs (puluwan), postpositions (id la), clitics (nisa:m , gijat) and conjunctive participles (ward n y wela) for stance-taking.Item A Corpus-Based Morphological Analysis of Sinhala Verbs.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Dilshani, W.S.N.; Dias, G.Verbs are essential components of a meaningful sentence and are important in understanding the sentence structure. This paper presents a morphological analysis of Sinhala verbs by combining traditional Sinhala grammar with an analysis of current usage based on a corpus of official documents. Sinhala verbs may be classified into a number of groups based on their morphology. However, there is currently no well-defined methodology to classify a particular verb. It is hypothesized that verb morphology patterns may be identified by analysis of a Sinhala text corpus. On the basis of that hypothesis, this research proposes a classification for Sinhala verbs based on their morphology which allows the morphological analysis of verbs in Sinhala text, and also the derivation of morphological rules for each class of verbs. This classification and rules are derived from an analysis of the corpus of official documents. Additionally, the rules were tested by applying them to another part of the corpus. This also allows the identification of irregular verbs, which do not fall into standard classes. With the analysis, it was identified that the usage of tenses in contemporary official documents is more complex than those given in grammar texts and different combinations of Sinhala grammatical forms are used to denote the time periods among standard tenses. Moreover, other writing forms of Sinhala were identified and it is shown that the existing classification of verbs in traditional grammar is insufficient to handle modern usage of the language.Item A Comprehensive Part of Speech (POS) Tag Set for Sinhala Language.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Dilshani, N.; Fernando, S.; Ranathunga, S.; Jayasena, S.; Dias, G.Sinhala, which belongs to Indo-Aryan language family, is a morphologically complex language. Most of the features of the words are postpositionally affixed to the root word. Thus, well-developed Part of Speech (POS) tag sets for languages such as English cannot be easily adopted to create a POS tag set for Sinhala. Moreover, currently available Sinhala POS tag sets have many limitations such as the unavailability of tags for certain words. The objective of the research is to overcome and to identify ambiguities and limitations of the present POS tag sets for Sinhala language, and to develop a comprehensive multi-level tag set for Sinhala language. The new tag set was designed after a thorough evaluation of different types of corpora such as news articles and official government letters, and as well as an analysis of the existing POS tag set for Sinhala. This new tag set consists of 148 tags and is organized into 3 levels. Thus, it covers most of the word classes and inflection based grammatical variations of the Sinhala language. The ultimate purpose of developing this tag set is to implement an automatic POS tagger, which is an essential tool in implementing Natural Language Processing Applications. To train the automatic POS tagger, a corpus of 300000 words has been POS annotated manually using this tag set. This tag set produced an overall accuracy of 84.68% and it bypasses the other Sinhala POS taggers. However, this annotation is done only up to level 2 in the tag set. Annotating at level 3 has the potential to introduce many ambiguities to the manual annotation process, due to the large number of POS tags. Thus this opens up new research avenues to investigate on the use of inflectional morphological features of Sinhala language, in order to determine the POS tag of a word at the third level.Item A Study on Adapting Local Context in Cartoon Dubbing (With Reference to Sinhala Dubbed English Cartoons in Sirasa & Hiru TV).(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Caldera, A.U.Adapting the local context in cartoon dubbing has become a growing trend in Sri Lanka today. In this process, in spite of the creativity, disappearance of the original story, losing the opportunity of learning English and learning a nonstandard Sinhala language, have been identified as problems by the Sri Lankan parents. The study discusses the perspectives of children on Sinhala dubbed cartoons and English cartoons telecasting in Sirasa TV and Hiru TV and the effectiveness of adapting local context in dubbing is decided on their reasons for preferences for either cartoons. 50 randomly selected students including 25 boys and 25 girls of grade 6, 7 and 8 from Colombo district government schools, were interviewed as they still belong to the age of watching cartoons and capable of giving opinions. Among them, 64% preferred English cartoons saying that they learn new English words and as the language is simple, the story is understood though not knowing the meaning of each word. Further, as they already know Sinhala, they are interested in knowing English, as their parents also compel to watch and stated the adaptation of Sri Lankan context in cartoons create confusion, as they are different from what their parents have told. In addition, the language seems complex for them with some colloquial Sinhala phrases. Comparatively the same group agreed that the jokes could be understood in Sinhala dubbed cartoons than in English. 36% preferred Sinhala dubbed cartoons, disliking English cartoons as their characters speak fast and that made them unable to understand a single word, whereas some declared the language in dubbed cartoons is colloquial as it is “Singlish” that they use in everyday life, therefore, they learn both Sinhala and English words. In this study, a recommendation is made to identify the target audience for effective cartoon dubbing.Item Dearth of Translators Impedes the Implementation of Official Languages Policy.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Subramaniam, A.The dearth of qualified translators and interpreters is a major hurdle to the implementation of the official languages policy, with a pressing need for them in courts, provincial councils and local authorities. The cadre strength of the translator service was around 600 in the past but there are only 131 in the service at present. This study is concerned about the dearth of translators, which impedes the implementation of official languages policies. The data consist of language audit reports on government institutions. According to the language audits conducted by the official languages commission, many government departments and institutions do not have the facilities to either reply to letters received in the second official language (Tamil) or to provide a reliable translations. In several government institutions, translation is a serious problem, especially in places including courts, divisional secretariats, police stations and hospitals. The purpose of this study is to identify the reasons for this dearth of translators. The non-availability of qualified translators should be addressed at school level with the education system being geared to produce persons who are bilingual or trilingual (Sinhala, Tamil and English) while the universities should also organize their language departments to produce graduates who are competent in at least two languages. This research concluded that general education should include training in the second national language; the national language which is not the mother tongue of an individual, meaning either Sinhala or Tamil and that the second language be made a compulsory subject in schools. It is also recommended that facilities be provided to students who wish to study the second national language as a subject at the GCE Ordinary and Advanced level examinations. In the university system, it is vital to design the language courses, which include both national languages. The Official Languages Commission also recommends that a translation centre be set up, modelled on the translation bureau of Canada to provide the service of translation of documents and of interpretation and related matters.