A Comparative Study on Personal Affixes Between Chinese and Sinhala

Abstract

"Affixation" is the process through which new words or words with a different meaning are generated. Personal affixes derive person-related words while talking about derivational affixes. The objective of this comparative study is comparing the usage and formation of the personal derivational affixes of Chinese and Sinhala languages. The research problem of this study is “what are the similarities and differences of personal affixes between both languages?”. This study is only concerned with the derivational prefixes and suffixes. Some of findings are; when focusing the usage, 者/zhĕ/ and lre /karu/ indicate the Person who has qualified competent, skills, experienced in certain field with specific ability. the word 作者 /zuòzhĕ/ can be divided as /zuò/ + /zhĕ/. /zuò/ is known as the verbal stem of this word and the meaning is ‘work, write’. /zhĕ/ is the derivational suffix of this word. by combining the derivational suffix with the verbal stem, the completed noun is derived. But the word lïlrejd/kamkaruwa:/ (worker/laborer) can be divided as /kam/ + /karu/ + /a:/. In this word, /kam/ is the verbal stem. /karu/ is the derivational suffix. /a:/ is the inflectional suffix. To make the complete word, there should be these three parts. Without the inflectional suffix, it becomes as an adjective or a new stem.The researcher used dictionaries, course notes, interviews with lecturers, etc. as primary sources of information. The researcher has used secondary sources such as books, journals, abstracts, and previous studies. Understanding the similarities and differences between Sinhala and Chinese will be made easier by this study.