Sinhala and Tamil influence on Sri Lankan English particle use: A corpus-based study on the case of ‘for

Abstract

Colonial expansion brought English into contact with different languages. In Sri Lanka, English has been in contact with Sinhala and Tamil for over 200 years. Today, all users of Sri Lankan English (SLE) are either bilingual or multilingual. In bilingual language processing, linguistic habits of one language exert influence on the other causing the latter to restructure. Although restructuring of a language in a language contact situation is overtly seen in phonology and lexis, syntactic and grammatical innovations are subtle and they take time to establish. When grammatical innovations do occur, they tend to begin at the intersection of grammar and lexis. The present paper analyses the lexis- grammar interface of Particle Verbs (PVs) in SLE with special reference to the particle/preposition ‘for’. The study uses a corpus-based methodology, and data are from the Sri Lankan, Indian, and Great Britain components of the International Corpus of English and Corpus of Global Web-based English. Results are presented of two PVs, ‘sit for’ and ‘contest for’, which are innovations having significant frequency of occurrence in SLE data. When these structures are compared with their corresponding equivalents in Sinhala and Tamil, it is revealed that the case environments of the relevant verbs in Sinhala and Tamil make it compulsory for those equivalents to have a counterpart for ‘for’. This may be why SLE prefers these PVs, while its historical input variety, British English, prefers simplex verbs without the particle, i.e. ‘sit’ and ‘contest’, to convey the same idea.