ISMIL 7  Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 27-29 June 2003  |  ISMIL Home  
Front Page Overview Call for Abstracts Programme Presenters Venue Getting There
The Sri Lankan Malay Verb
Peter Slomanson
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
sloman@panix.com

From a typological perspective, the presence of postpositions and prenominal adjectives in modern Sri Lankan Malay suggests an SOV grammar in line with that of Sinhala and Tamil. However, the distribution of main verbs in at least one variety of modern Sri Lankan Malay differs from what we find in Sinhala and Tamil. In this Sri Lankan Malay grammar, the main verb appears to the left both of objects and of infinitival clauses. In contrast with more familiar varieties of Malay which lack a finiteness distinction, we find infinitives which are both morphologically and syntactically distinct from matrix verbs. Non-finite status is morphologically encoded by reanalysis of the active transitivizing verb prefix in traditional varieties as a marker of non-finite status.

Page location: https://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/archive/ismil/7/abstracts/slomanson.html
Page last modified: 6 May 2003