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Author: search.filters.author.Perera, K.Subject: search.filters.subject.Sinhala

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    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.
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    Ithin e: kiyanne: An Investigation into Sinhala Discourse Markers
    (Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Perera, K.
    Even though discourse markers – such as „well‟ and „now‟ in English – have important functions in speech, they have not figured as an important research area in Sinhala language studies (Fraser 1999; Perera & Strauss 2015). This paper aims to provide a preliminary mapping of the forms and functions of Sinhala discourse markers. The data consist of naturally occurring speech in formal and informal settings including interviews, debates and conversations. These are transcribed and coded for their discursive functions. Using a broad definition of discourse markers as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk…which are both cataphoric and anaphoric” (Schiffrin 1988, p.31) over ten discourse markers are identified in the speech samples available. These include the markers „mehemayi‟, „ithin‟, „daen‟, „me:‟, „hondayi‟ and „e:kiyanne‟. The saliency of their use depends not only on the speech situation but personal differences as well. These findings illustrate the necessity of further research on Sinhala discourse features in order to understand how Sinhala discourse is structured.