Volitivity and Subject Case Marking in Sinhala
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Proceedings o f the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
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Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Sri Lanka, has a well-known semantic classification of verbs. All Sinhala verb roots occur in one or two stem classes, commonly known as volitives and involitives (see Gair 1990; Gair & Paolillo 1997; Inman 1993; Beavers & Zubair 2010, 2013). The (in)volitivity of a verb denotes the extent to which the external argument is involved in the action denoted by the verb. For example, in (la), the verb natdmwa 'dance’, in the volitive form, is both volitional and intentional on the part of the subject Lal. By contrast, in (lb), with the involitive verb, the act o f dancing is either non-volitional or unplanned as far as Lal is concerned.1'2
Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Sri Lanka, has a well-known semantic classification of verbs. All Sinhala verb roots occur in one or two stem classes, commonly known as volitives and involitives (see Gair 1990; Gair & Paolillo 1997; Inman 1993; Beavers & Zubair 2010, 2013). The (in)volitivity of a verb denotes the extent to which the external argument is involved in the action denoted by the verb. For example, in (la), the verb natdmwa 'dance’, in the volitive form, is both volitional and intentional on the part of the subject Lal. By contrast, in (lb), with the involitive verb, the act o f dancing is either non-volitional or unplanned as far as Lal is concerned.1'2
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Chou, C.T., Hettiarachchi, S. (2015). "Volitivity and Subject Case Marking in Sinhala", Proceedings o f the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pp. 99-108