A Contrastive Study of Tamil and Sinhala Auxiliary Verbs

Abstract

This thesis presents a contrastive study of Tamil and Sinhala auxiliary verbs within a structural frame work. The Jaffna variety of Tamil and the Colombo variety of Sinhala both as spoken by the educated constitute the data for this work. In this study the data is restricted to the morphology of the auxiliary verbs in both languages and the following aspects are covered. Morphology of Tamil auxiliary verbs. Morphology of Sinhala auxiliary verbs. Points of contrasts between the two auxiliary verbs system. As stated in chapters II and III, it can be concluded that auxiliaries are a group of verbs, that are attributive to their preceding verbs in the grammatical aspects and their identity is revealed in their combination, with another verb as a second member. In both languages, the first verb element of the compound verb construction has a lexical function, that denotes an action, event or state and is therefore, called the main verb. The second member of the verb element, however does not have a lexical funtion. Instead it expresses grammatical categories, such as aspect, mood, passive etc. and for this reason, the second verb is referred to as the auxiliary verb. Among the auxiliaries identified with its preceding verbs, there are two types of structures. One type appears after verbal participle or perfect tense of the main verbs, and another type after the infinitive of the main verbs. The auxiliary which comes after inifinitive does not equally attain the auxiliary status like the auxiliaries which come after verbal participle or perfect tense. In chapter IV an attempt has been made to bring out the similarities and differences between Tamil and Sinhala. In both languages, the auxiliary form is an integral part of the verb pharse and it plays a key role in the mechanism of grammar. The contrast has been drawn at three levels; formal, syntactic and semantic. Form, structure and meaning are closely linked and well-knit that they cannot be separated though they be distinguished. Both languages have the same grammatical syntactical categories like subject, verb, object etc. At the same time, they are marked by certain individual features too. Tamil finite verb usually indicates the tense, person, number, and gender by the pronominal endings but in Sinhala verb indicates only tense. Thus Tamil and Sinhala are both marked by ‘linguistic universal’ and ‘Features specific’. The outcome of this research has contributed for further better understanding of auxiliaries in both vernacular languages in Sri Lanka.