International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka (ICLSL)
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Item A Study about Language Rights Violation in the Post War Sri Lanka.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Wickramasinghe, D. D.Language constitutes a fundamental right of all citizens of Sri Lanka. According to Chapter III, Article 12 (2), no citizen shall be discriminated against on grounds of language. The constitutional provisions thus entitle a citizen to transact business with and access government in the language of his/her choice. Language as a right defines a set of duties and obligations on the part of the State and of the citizen that would enable the fulfillment of such rights. Language emerged as a crucial factor in political mobilization of the two major communities, the Sinhala and Tamil in the post war scenario. However, the language rights continued to be flouted in certain state sectors in the postwar Sri Lanka. The objective of this study was to find out which sectors in the society have the most tendency to breach the language policy and there forth to recommend a proper mechanism. The findings reveal that the non-compliance of language policy occurs to a degree in terms of visibility and ambience and service delivery in the government offices. It is recommended to perform a revision in the language policy act and the proper decentralization of the language policy provisions to the ground level and to create designated bilingual positions in the government sector. The study was of qualitative nature and the data for the study was accumulated from the complaints and investigation Division Official Languages Commission of Sri Lanka where the language complaints was analyzed in terms of the nature of the violation of the language policy.Item A Study on the Utility of Hierarchical Phrase-Based Model for Low Resource Languages.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Shanmugarasa, Y.; Thayasivam, U.With the rebellion of internet, people got more opportunities to go global. There is the issue of communication, which is made more challenging due to difference in languages. English is the generally spoken language and there is no assurance that everyone is proficient in it. Therefore, translation plays a major role. Currently, South Asian languages are dominantly translated using traditional statistical and neural machine translation approaches. South Asian languages lack necessary natural language resources and tools, hence are classified as low resourced languages. This limits the effectiveness achievable in machine translation of those languages. Compared to English language, South Asian languages are morphologically rich and are commonly used in different sentence structures. For example, the structure of a sentence is subject-verb-object in English while it is subject-object-verb in most South Asian languages. As official languages of Sri Lanka are low resourced, when it is used to translate using traditional statistical machine translation, it is impossible to produce sentences with acceptable sentence structure because of sub-phrases which can only be reordered using distortion reordering model, are independent of their context. In addition, using phrases longer than three words barely improves the translation because such phrases are infrequent in the corpora due to data sparsity. To overcome this problem hierarchical phrase model translation, which uses grammar rules formed by the Synchronous Context Free Grammar, can be used. Moses is selected to build the baseline system. In the experiments, the system used 50000 parallel sentences for Tamil and English. Using BLEU as a metric, the hierarchical phrase-based model achieves 3.42 for Tamil to English translation and 1.73 for vice-versa. This score improves 0.72 from traditional approach. For Sinhala to Tamil, it achieves 11.18 and 10.73 for vice-versa. Moreover, the system could further be improved by establishing certain rules.Item Language Policy Implementation: A Comparative Study between Sri Lanka and Canada(Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Wickramasinghe, P.D.D.D.Accommodation of a multi-ethnic population within a territory of a single state has been largely acknowledged as a worldwide issue due to the problems stemming out from the linguistic disparities. In the most of the countries in the world, this scenario has been either erupted due to decade long colonial regimes or owing to the influx of the different migrant ethnic groups at various given times in the historical context of the countries concerning. Thus successive governments over the world for years have been implementing number of languages policies to lessen the widening rift between dominant ethnic groups and the minorities arising owing to the different kind of languages that they speak. The official bilingualism is the ultimate solution that the governments have been embarking on. This recognition of the two or more official languages can largely be attributed to a scenario stemming out of a socio-political dilemma therefore it had been a laborious task where the states concerning considered as the last resort to create the much needed harmony within their countries. To date, around 200 countries in the world recognise two or more official languages; The Sri Lankan and Canadian experience in this regard has much in common to share as the two countries had to undergo number volatile socio political nuances at various instances in their historical contexts. The fact that how Canadian language policy differs from the Sri Lankan language policy is considered here. Today, the Canadian experience in the bilingualism and language policy implementation has achieved tremendous success; therefore this paper attempts to highlight the currents problems relating to language policy implementation in Sri Lanka in a comparative perspective.Item The Process of Translating and Editing of Pāli Texts in Sri Lanka from 19th Century to the Present(Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Rajapaksha, D.M.It is to be emphasised here that the pivotal objective of compilation, translation and edition of Pāli texts was not only to enhance Theravāda tradition in its pristine purity in Sri Lanka but also to ensure its perpetual establishment making it immensely accessible to people in the world. The scrutiny of the history of Theravāda tradition in Sri Lanka exposes that the commentaries, sub-commentaries, annotations, glossaries and other related literature compiled on the Tripitaka - Sutta, Vinaya and Abhidhamma were immensely conducive to produce eminent lay and ordained scholars. After the documentation of the Tripitakain the 1st century in Sri Lanka, the recital of the Dhamma for its preservation continued and its oral tradition (Bhānakas) as Theravāda contributed to the establishment of the monastic education system spreading it throughout Sri Lanka. Thus, it is evident from the above factors that Theravāda tradition executed the process of translation and edition of Pāli texts from the inception. In the past century, there exited a prominent development in the above process due to the contribution of printing press during the colonial period. Hence, research paper will discuss the process of translating and editing of Pāli texts that contributed to enhancement of Theravāda tradition from 19th century to the present.Item Code Mixing and Code Switching as a Strategy of Persuasion in Sri Lankan Television Commercials(Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Ishara, G.L.P.M.Language mixing is a common linguistic phenomenon practiced in bilingual or multilingual contexts. It is referred to as code mixing or code switching. Code mixing and code switching between Sinhala and English can be considered a common linguistic behavior in Sri Lanka. This is especially can be seen in marketing and advertising fields which need the most appropriate language in order to inculcate the desired out come. The present study aims to investigate the function of Sinhala – English code switching and code mixing as a persuasive strategy in Sri Lankan TV commercials. The sample of the present study contains fifty recordings of TV commercials broadcasted in two private TV channels. The data analysis has been presented both quantitatively and qualitatively. As a whole, the findings of the study revealed that, the code switching and code mixing phenomena have given an admirable support to strengthen the persuasive strategies used by the copywriters. The data analysis revealed that intra-sentential code mixing is frequently used and English nouns are commonly inserted in TV commercials. It is evident that through the usage of mixed language, the copywriters are targeting the youth to be the consumers of their products. Most of the inserted English words have their equivalent Sinhala words but are not a part of peoples‟ active vocabulary. The outcome of this study will help the copywriters to enhance their language strategies and the TV viewers to understand the persuasive language strategies used by the copywriters.Item Attitude about Foreign Languages(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Lewis, R.L.I arrived in Sri Lanka at the end of January 2005. By the end of February I was settling in to my new home (a room in a guest house) and was beginning to learn a bit about the people and cultures of the country that would become my new home. I decided that I must learn either Sinhala or Tamil, the two primary indigenous languages of the nation, but ultimately did not. Why not? Thus begins a remarkable adventure into that space that exists at the intersection of linguistics, cultural anthropology, sociology, ethnic and religious relations, the influences of a colonial past, politics (both domestic and international), government educational policies etc…I do not presume to suggest answers to the seemingly endless questions which arise from the considerations above (taken separately or in various combinations) but rather to begin the process of framing the questions which may ultimately lead to a better understanding of what all of this means, not simply in terms of historical causes but also in terms of productive strategies for the future. These issues and the questions that spring from them are of importance not simply to Sri Lanka but to numberless communities, countries and regions around the world that face similar and equally complex and urgent challenges.