International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka (ICLSL)
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Item Language Acquisition Patterns: A Case Study of a Child Acquiring Sinhalese as the First Language(Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Weerawardhana, V.Child language acquisition is an innate strategy which reveals the psychological base of human language. Innate hypothesis is the pre-knowledge of the language. Human beings are born with this ability of internalising the first language with the help of language Acquisition Device (LAD). Children acquire structural regularities of their mother language (L1) from their environment. This happens in the critical period of the language development which is identified as the period from first six months to three years. This research is a case study focusing on the nature and the patterns of acquiring the Sinhalese language as L1. The child was in its critical period of language acquisition and data was collected using electronic and manual transcription. Structural linguistic analysis and theoretical concepts of Transformational Grammar on language acquisition such as competence and performance, generalisation, simplification, deep structure and surface structure are employed as the methodology. Accordingly, the gradual development of L1 acquisition from 6 months to 24 months are discussed. Babbling, sound acquisition and patterns of one word utterances, two word and three word utterances are among the findings. A comparison with the previous studies reveal that the patterns of above utterances, generalisation and simplification are commonly visible in the acquisition period. Also, the child often proves that competence is greater than performance. The results of the study further highlighted some semantic, syntactic and morphological overgeneralisations. Thus, this study and its findings are of significant importance to psycholinguists, language therapists and to researchers interested in studying child language acquisition process.Item A comparative Study on the Structures of Natural Languages and Logical Arguments(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Weerawardhana, V.Language is the base in both Linguistics and Logic. The objective of the Logicians is not to study the natural languages but to study logical arguments in natural languages. However, identifying the structure of natural languages can be very much useful to make the correct deduction in logic. Therefore Semantics is important in both Linguistics and Logic. At the beginning Logicians tried to find out the logical patterns of natural languages, but most of the time they have seen the complexity, ambiguity, vagueness, and context based meaning of them. Therefore limited patterns of natural languages are considered in the formation of logically valid inferences in artificial, machine or formal languages. As well it is still a challenge to convert some components of natural languages into machine language .In order to face challenges in creating artificial languages, it is important to analyze the structure of both languages through a comparative study. In this study it is expected to identify sentence patterns and morphological symbols in both languages. Statement logical concepts and predicate logical concepts are taken in this research as logical languages.Stuctural linguistic analysis is done in this regard. The results of this study reveal that logical symbols abbreviate or shrink the meaning of natural languages in its well-formed formulas. In comparison of the Structures of the two languages, logical patterns can be seen morphologically and syntactically. Compositionality of the semantical component is also an important factor in the formation of logically valid arguments. Therefore this study supports to identify similarities and differences of the structure of the natural and machine languages .At the same time, studying semantics of natural languages and basic concepts of logic helps to analyze the language more efficiently and to generate smart machine languages.