Symposia & Conferences
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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 The Depiction of Reality in the Films of Charlie Chaplin: A Marxist Perspective(Drama & Theatre and Image Arts Unit, Department of Fine Arts, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Darshana, K.D.Charlie Chaplin is considered a landmark figure in 20th Century Cinema. He reresents the silent era of Cinema that can be appreciated by spectators from any lifestyle, particularly regardless of differences in language and culture. The purpose of the present study is to examine the depiction of reality in two of his numerous cinematic masterpieces, City Light (1931) and The Circus (1928) from a Marxist critical perspective. The plots of both these films are based on the worldly and sentimental phenomenon of love. Chaplin effectively exploits a simple subject to depict the flaws of appearance. For the purposes of the present study, the two primary sources were analyzed from a Marxist point of view with reference to the relevant theoretical literature on Marxism and Cinematography. Based on the Marxian understanding that reality is only the reality of the material relations of production, it can be argued that appearance is far away from reality. When reading the above cinematic masterpieces, it becomes apparent that the issues that have been neglected in the mainstream discourses are conveyed to the audiences coincidentally through the medium of comedy. Furthermore, the analysis of the afore-mentioned works of cinema reveals how reality has been undermined by ideology.