Contact Language Influence on Sri Lankan English Prepositional Verbs

Abstract

Although English has quasi-official status in Sri Lanka as a link language, average user of Sri Lankan English (SLE) seems to still have doubted regarding the standards and norms of SLE. In order to empower the SLE user, adequate description or codification of SLE is vital. To this end a research gap is found particularly in empirical investigations of SLE grammar. The present paper investigates a grammatical feature of SLE, Prepositional Verbs (PVs), using written language data from two standard corpora representing SLE, British English, and Indian English. The paper also aims at tracing possible contact effects from Sinhala and Tamil on the creation of innovative PHs in SLE because English has been in contact with these contact languages in Sri Lanka for over 200 years. Analysis of the data from the two corpus environments using corpus access software concordances results in several PVs that show significant frequency of occurrence in SLE compared to the other two varieties. Out of these, the creation of 'enrol for/in' as opposed to 'enrol at', 'teach for' as opposed to 'teach', and 'inquire from ' as opposed to 'inquire of' seems to have been influenced by the equivalents of these P Vs available in Sinhala and Tamil. However, the use of “educate on ' in place of 'educate about', 'participate at' in place of 'participate in', and 'employ at' in place of 'employ in' shows an opposite tendency, which may be a result of (over) application of 'learnt' rules, which can be attributed to the primarily educational acquisition contexts of SLE