This study is a detailed investigation of a number of issues in colloquial
Sinhala morphosyntax. These issues primarily concern grammatical relations,
argument structure, phrase structure and focus constructions. The
theoretical framework of this study is Lexical Functional Grammar.¶Chapter
1 introduces the issues to be discussed, followed by a brief introduction
of some essential aspects of colloquial Sinhala as background for the
discussion in the following chapters. In Chapter 2 we present basic
concepts of the theoretical framework of Lexical Functional Grammar.¶ The
next three chapters mainly concern grammatical relations, argument
structure and clause structure in colloquial Sinhala. Chapter 3 examines
grammatical relations. The main focus lies in establishing the subject
grammatical relation in terms of various subjecthood diagnostics. We show
that only a very small number of diagnostics are reliable, and that the
evidence for subject is weaker than assumed previously. All the subjecthood
diagnostics that were examined select the most prominent argument in the
argument structure as the subject, i.e. 'logical subject'. However, there
appear to be no processes in the language that are sensitive to the subject
in the grammatical relations structure, i.e. 'gr-subject'. Further, there
is no evidence for other grammatical relations like objects. In Chapter 4
we discuss the agentless construction and related valency alternation
phenomena. It was previously assumed that the agentless construction,
valency alternation phenomena and the involitive construction are all
related. We argue that the agentless construction should be treated as a
different construction from the involitive construction. We also show that
the agentless construction and the involitive construction have contrasting
characteristics, and that treatment of them as separate constructions can
account for some phenomena which did not receive an explanation previously.
The valency alternation phenomena are related to the agentless
construction, therefore there is no valency alternation in involitive
constructions. It will be shown that verbs undergoing the valency
alternation can be distinguished from the other verbs in terms of the
lexical semantic properties of individual verbs. Chapter 5 examines the
structure of non-verbal sentences in terms of a number of morphosyntactic
phenomena. It was previously argued that verbal sentences and non-verbal
sentences in colloquial Sinhala differ in terms of clause structure.
However, the present study shows evidence to the contrary.¶ The next two
chapters deal with modelling contrastive focus and the phrase structure of
the language. Chapter 6 is a detailed analysis of the contrastive focus
(cleft) construction in various clause types in the language, and proposes
a unified syntactic treatment of contrastive focus. Contrastive focus is in
some constructions morphologically encoded, while in others it involves
both morphological and configurational assignment of focus. The complex
interaction between focus markers and verb morphology in various focus
constructions is accounted for by general well-formedness conditions
applying to the f-structure, and the principles of Functional Uncertainty
and Morphological Blocking. In Chapter 7, we discuss the phrase structure
of the language, in particular such issues as its non-configurational
nature and the lack of evidence for VP. We propose non-configurational S
and some functional projections to account for word order freedom under S
and to explain certain morphosyntactic phenomena, such as configurational
focus assignment. Finally, Chapter 8 summarises the conclusions made in
previous chapters.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216817 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Henadeerage, Kumara, kumara.henadeerage@anu.edu.au |
| Publisher | The Australian National University. Faculty of Arts |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.anu.edu.au/legal/copyrit.html), Copyright Kumara Henadeerage |
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