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Item Stance-Taking in Sinhala Discourse.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Perera, K.Stance – or stance-taking - is a robust area of study in discourse that has been little applied in Sinhala. Stance is the study of linguistic resources used to express the speaker‟s emotions, attitudes, evaluation of and commitment to propositional content (Biber 2006; Schiffrin 1988; Zubair n.d.). Adverbials, verbs and adjectives marking affect and evidentiality, modals and emphatics have been identified as features showing stance in English (Biber 2006). Given the paucity of work on stance in Sinhala (Zubair n.d.), the main aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the linguistic resources used for stance in Sinhala. Additionally, the paper will also describe selected features of Sinhala that are productively used for stance-marking. Assuming that political discourse is a space for exaggerated instances of stance-taking, televised political debates in Sri Lankan media are used for investigation. Approximately six hours of televised spoken data are transcribed and coded for features that show stance-taking. This study shows that Sinhala uses many of the same features that other languages, including English, use for stance-taking, such as adverbials, affect-laden parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives), and discourse markers. Other than such typical features, Sinhala also uses the focused (or cleft) sentences (eya giye: gedara) productively for stance-taking. Since there are few pragmatic studies of focused sentences in Sinhala (Gair and Paolillo, 1997), this study will describe such uses in political rhetoric. In addition, Sinhala also uses quasi-verbs (puluwan), postpositions (id la), clitics (nisa:m , gijat) and conjunctive participles (ward n y wela) for stance-taking.Item Ithin e: kiyanne: An Investigation into Sinhala Discourse Markers(Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Perera, K.Even though discourse markers – such as „well‟ and „now‟ in English – have important functions in speech, they have not figured as an important research area in Sinhala language studies (Fraser 1999; Perera & Strauss 2015). This paper aims to provide a preliminary mapping of the forms and functions of Sinhala discourse markers. The data consist of naturally occurring speech in formal and informal settings including interviews, debates and conversations. These are transcribed and coded for their discursive functions. Using a broad definition of discourse markers as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk…which are both cataphoric and anaphoric” (Schiffrin 1988, p.31) over ten discourse markers are identified in the speech samples available. These include the markers „mehemayi‟, „ithin‟, „daen‟, „me:‟, „hondayi‟ and „e:kiyanne‟. The saliency of their use depends not only on the speech situation but personal differences as well. These findings illustrate the necessity of further research on Sinhala discourse features in order to understand how Sinhala discourse is structured.Item High-focus and time-immediate indexicals: A study of Sinhala discourse markers me: ‘this’ and dæn ‘now’(Journal of Pragmatics, 2015) Perera, K.; Strauss, S.This article is an investigation of Sinhala demonstrative me:2 and temporal adverb dæn, in their functions as discourse markers. We analyze a corpus of approximately 400 min of naturally occurring, entirely unscripted spoken discourse. The data for this study are taken from televised interviews and political debates, involving a total of 16 speakers (11 male and 5 female). The data were transcribed and Romanized (adapted from Gair, 1998a) to facilitate morpho-syntactic-pragmatic analysis, and allowing for both interlineal glossing and the marking of relevant prosodic features. We identified all instances of the target forms me: and dæn and coded them for their functions as demonstrative/temporal reference markers in addition to their functions as discourse markers. We illustrate the functions of me: ‘this’ as a filler and as a clarification marker, and the functions of dæn ‘now’ as a contrastive marker, a discursive strategy building marker, and a marker of defensiveness to deflect designedly direct face threatening accusations. Our findings indicate that me: ‘this’ and dæn ‘now’ function as discourse management markers, exhibiting remarkable patterns of online interactional and cognitive processes of focus, repair, hesitation, and contrast across the majority of speakers and across all interactional settings in our database.