A contrastive study of word order in Sinhala and English

Abstract

The present study is a comparative analysis of word order in Sinhala and English. The main objective of the study is to understand the different properties of the two languages in respect of word order which introduces the Sinhala learner of English (hereafter the L2 learner), the comparative concepts of two languages (Sinhala and English) so as to facilitate them to acquire English. In the methodology of the study, the word order of both languages has been analyzed separately and compared. The data for spoken Sinhala presented here is drawn from several native speakers. Being a non-native speaker of English, the researcher of this survey has drawn the data for English from native samples. At the end of some sentences the names of those who have cited them, have been quoted. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The Introduction‘deals with a brief account of Sinhala ,one of the two official languages the other being Tamil and the mother tongue of the majority (about 70%) in Sri Lanka is an Indo Aryan language spoken mainly in Sri Lanka. According to Katre (1964: 5) the term Indo-Aryan represents the language stream brought in by the invading Aryans towards the beginning or early half of the second millennium B.C into India. Sinhala has two main varieties: literary and spoken which differ from each other in important ways. Literary Sinhala is the language of virtually all written materials not just literature in the specific sense. It is characteristically written and read, on those relatively rare occasions when it is heard, it is generally read aloud from a previously prepared text. Spoken Sinhala, setting aside some formal sub- varieties heard primarily in lectures and seminars, is basically the language used by everyone at all social and educational levels.