ICLSL 2017

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://repository.kln.ac.lk/handle/123456789/18326

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Morphology

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    A Comparative Study of Odia and Kui Morphology.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Penthoi, G. C.
    Kui (ISO639-3 Code „Kxu‟) is a language spoken by Kondh or Kondha /Kɔndhɔ/ tribe. Majority of the Kui-speaking Kondhs live in the hilly and forested areas of South and central Odisha especially in the undivided districts of Kandhamal, Koraput and Kalahandi. Kondh people being an underdeveloped tribal people, study of their language, society and culture draws a lot of attention of academics, administration and other purposes. The objective of this study is to compare morphological analysis or word formation of Odia and Kui languages. It should be pointed out here that the Odia language, which is the major language of the state, is surrounding the Konda village on all sides. It is also the main linguistic medium in educational, social, economic and religious spheres. Therefore, Kui has borrowed words and other linguistic features from Odia. In all the Kui speaking areas a large number of Odia words have intermingled in the ordinary speech of the Konds. This fluctuation is due to the amount of contact the hill-man has with the Odia people. The approach is data oriented and uses in general. The structuralist methodology has been followed for the analysis of the data in the present work. Data was collected from the native speakers through field visit to various Kui speaking areas. Some of the findings depict that the word formation process of Kui is simpler than Odia Language. Reduplication, Echo formation and contraction process of morphology are not frequent in Kui language as in Odia. All other morphological processes are same in both languages, although the number of vocabulary of Kui language is very less. It is suggested that the findings are not the ultimatum, many more findings may be possible if further research done in such areas of study.
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    From „Facebook‟ to „Bukiya‟: Language Change in Facebook among Undergraduates of the University of Vocational Technology.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Karunarathna, J. A. M. B.; Jayashan, M. N. L. C. L.; Wijayasen, W. A. S. R.; Papith, V.; Shakthibaala, S.; Dharmadasa, A.S.U.; Nizreen, Z.
    Language transmits cultural values, norms and beliefs. Media has always influenced the constant change of language. Especially with the rapid change of technology, from internet to smartphones, it has changed the way people communicate. It is said that human communication has become easier and quicker through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. As long as human communication has become quicker through social networking, language has also changed rapidly. It has contributed to English language by adding words and phrases such as „OMG‟, „LOL‟, unfriend, etc. among the users. The aim of the research is to investigate the changes occurred in the language being used in the social media among Sri Lankan users with particular focus on Facebook. Data is collected in snowball sampling technique from the undergraduates of University of Vocational Technology, through six voluntary research agents. They are active users of Facebook and collected data for four months. These voluntary research agents are undergraduates of University of Vocational Technology, Sri Lanka. In collecting data, morphological changes were focused in status updates and comments in Facebook, in Sinhala, Tamil and English among the undergraduates of University of Vocational Technology. Findings were thematically categorized and analyzed. Results shows interesting findings across languages, such as the variations of the same word in Sinhala „supiri‟, „patta‟, „pata pata‟ to „fatta‟ throughout the time, and a similar word for the same in status updates in Tamil „sattapadi‟. Further, according to findings, many morphological changes have occurred with blending and borrowing. However, comments made in English language show a comparative reduction to „likes‟ and emojis. Findings illustrate the necessity of further research in analysis of discourse across three languages in social media since the language change is rapid, complex and unprecedented.
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    A Study on Common Morphosyntactic Errors in English Made by Sri Lankan Second Language Learners.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Egodage, W.
    Syntax is the rules with which words are combined to create sentences. Morphology is the study of morphemes which are the smallest significant units of grammar. The Second language learners of Sri Lanka face major difficulties in these vital areas of English language due to confusions with grammatical errors caused by being unaware of morphosyntactic rules. The main objectives of the research are to identify the common morphosyntactic errors, to trace out the causes of the aforesaid errors in English language among second language learners of Si Lanka and to provide suggestions for reducing such errors in English language among secondary school students. The research is designed to carry out both quantitative and qualitative data analysis. A questionnaire survey was given to thirty randomly selected Government school students of the Advanced Level grade to identify the morphosyntactic errors they make in English. Results of the study revealed that concord in auxiliaries; SVO pattern, articles, prepositions and tenses are the major types of syntactic errors, whereas affixation and compound related errors, conversion related errors are the major types of morphological errors. The survey concludes that syntactic and morphological errors have been caused by confusing and ineffective teaching methods of English for second language learners. These areas should be given their rightful place in language learning. The findings of this study demonstrate the utility of employing systematic and the most effective strategies for teaching syntactic and morphological structures of English language. Thus, it is important to state that the writers of English textbooks for second language learners should include teaching methods that could be easily understood by students in the writing of English textbooks.
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    A Corpus-Based Morphological Analysis of Sinhala Verbs.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Dilshani, W.S.N.; Dias, G.
    Verbs are essential components of a meaningful sentence and are important in understanding the sentence structure. This paper presents a morphological analysis of Sinhala verbs by combining traditional Sinhala grammar with an analysis of current usage based on a corpus of official documents. Sinhala verbs may be classified into a number of groups based on their morphology. However, there is currently no well-defined methodology to classify a particular verb. It is hypothesized that verb morphology patterns may be identified by analysis of a Sinhala text corpus. On the basis of that hypothesis, this research proposes a classification for Sinhala verbs based on their morphology which allows the morphological analysis of verbs in Sinhala text, and also the derivation of morphological rules for each class of verbs. This classification and rules are derived from an analysis of the corpus of official documents. Additionally, the rules were tested by applying them to another part of the corpus. This also allows the identification of irregular verbs, which do not fall into standard classes. With the analysis, it was identified that the usage of tenses in contemporary official documents is more complex than those given in grammar texts and different combinations of Sinhala grammatical forms are used to denote the time periods among standard tenses. Moreover, other writing forms of Sinhala were identified and it is shown that the existing classification of verbs in traditional grammar is insufficient to handle modern usage of the language.
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    A Comprehensive Part of Speech (POS) Tag Set for Sinhala Language.
    (The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Dilshani, N.; Fernando, S.; Ranathunga, S.; Jayasena, S.; Dias, G.
    Sinhala, which belongs to Indo-Aryan language family, is a morphologically complex language. Most of the features of the words are postpositionally affixed to the root word. Thus, well-developed Part of Speech (POS) tag sets for languages such as English cannot be easily adopted to create a POS tag set for Sinhala. Moreover, currently available Sinhala POS tag sets have many limitations such as the unavailability of tags for certain words. The objective of the research is to overcome and to identify ambiguities and limitations of the present POS tag sets for Sinhala language, and to develop a comprehensive multi-level tag set for Sinhala language. The new tag set was designed after a thorough evaluation of different types of corpora such as news articles and official government letters, and as well as an analysis of the existing POS tag set for Sinhala. This new tag set consists of 148 tags and is organized into 3 levels. Thus, it covers most of the word classes and inflection based grammatical variations of the Sinhala language. The ultimate purpose of developing this tag set is to implement an automatic POS tagger, which is an essential tool in implementing Natural Language Processing Applications. To train the automatic POS tagger, a corpus of 300000 words has been POS annotated manually using this tag set. This tag set produced an overall accuracy of 84.68% and it bypasses the other Sinhala POS taggers. However, this annotation is done only up to level 2 in the tag set. Annotating at level 3 has the potential to introduce many ambiguities to the manual annotation process, due to the large number of POS tags. Thus this opens up new research avenues to investigate on the use of inflectional morphological features of Sinhala language, in order to determine the POS tag of a word at the third level.