Talk:Sinhala/Archive 51102

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

moved from article

I moved the following contribution of 198.61.20.7 out of the arucle. It is not in encyclopedic style and the copyright is unclear:

Reference Devices in Sinhala Neelakshi Chandrasena Premawardhena, University of Siegen, Germany Abstract This study examines various reference devices employed by Sinhala native speakers in order to keep track of participants in the discourse. Sinhala is the majority language spoken in Sri Lanka. Besides Divehi, the language of the Maldives, Sinhala is the only Indo-Aryan language geographically separated from the other members of its family, such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati spoken in India. Disanayaka (1998:118/19) argues that "Sinhala occupies a unique position among the languages of South Asia because of its close affinities with two of the major linguistic families of the Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian". Tamil, the oldest of the Dravidian languages and Sinhala have coexisted for generations interacting with each other, thus bearing an impact on the phonology, morphology and syntax of Sinhala (Karunatillake, 1984; Disanayaka, 1991) There exists a vast difference between the spoken and the written variety of modern Sinhala. The Sinhala diglossia situation has made many linguists refer to the two forms of written and spoken language as 'Literary Sinhala' and 'Spoken Sinhala'. The latter makes a further distinction between Formal and Colloquial varieties (see Karunatillake 1992; Disanayaka 1998; Gair 1998). The Formal Spoken Sinhala is usually used in speeches, lectures or in the media and the Colloquial Sinhala is the language of ordinary conversation. In this study I will refer to Spoken Sinhala, where in fact the language of normal day to day conversation is meant. Due to the vast differences between the two varieties of Sinhala, this study concentrates on data available from Spoken Sinhala only. The aim of the study is to discuss reference devices employed by Sinhala native speakers in discourse cohesion. The identity of the speaker (first person) and the addressee (second person) is generally evident in discourse and does not cause much difficulty to decode who it is being referred to. Hence the focus will be mainly on devices employed to identify third persons referred to in discourse i.e. third person pronouns and other devices such as nouns, zero anaphora, honorific and kinship terms. It is important to note that sociolinguistic factors play a significant role in identifying referents in Sinhala (see Chandrasena Premawardhena 2001:23-24, 15-159). Social norms are as important as formal grammatical rules in this process. Thus this study will also provide a sociolinguistic interpretation of reference devices employed in Spoken Sinhala. There are a number of personal pronouns used in Spoken Sinhala as illustrated in Table 2. However, due to social norms and customs such as respecting the elders by not addressing or referring to them with proper names or pronouns, the Sinhalese use nominal reference devices such as kinship terms or honorific terms instead. Hence this study gives an insight into both pronominal and nominal reference devices. Reference devices in Spoken Sinhala have not been the subject of attention in many extensive studies apart from Chandrasena Premawardhena (2001). In Gair (1998); Gair/Karunatillake (2000), the focus has been mainly on the so called "neutral" pronouns, i.e. the third person pronouns used by the educated urbanites, while categorising the rest of the third person pronouns used in everyday speech by the not-so-educated rural folk as derogatory. This paper will give an insight into pronominal and nominal reference devices in Spoken Sinhala and sociolinguistic factors which determine the use of above mentioned reference devices in day to day conversation. Further, various problems arising in decoding the referents such as ambiguity and how various reference devices used in Sinhala give an insight into the social status, age and sex of the referent in question and how the speaker's attitude towards the referent is expressed through the choice of particular reference devices will be discussed. The neutral and derogatory use of the third person pronouns in Spoken Sinhala will be discussed in detail here and argued that this is mainly determined by the social status, age, sex of the speaker/addressee and referent in question as well as the context of the situation and not solely by the pronouns used in discourse

Pjacobi 21:50, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)

Needs Major Fixing

I have made some small improvements. There still needs to be a lot more changes to make this article more acceptable. Imperial78

I have made many more improvements. There are more needed. Perhaps some of the previous edits, were made by non first language English speakers? Imperial78