Morphosyntactic Parallels and Contrasts in Sri Lankan Contact Language Participial Constructions

Abstract

The Sri Lankan contact varieties of Malay (SLM) and Portuguese (SLP) share features they do not share with other Sri Lankan languages, including pre-verbal functional markers for tense, mood and aspect (TMA) contrasts. Both contact languages also feature morphosyntactic phenomena related to finiteness that are absent from their lexical source languages (Malay) or organised differently (Portuguese), with the result that in the Sri Lankan language area, the grammars of these languages most closely resemble each other. There are similarities and contrasts in the form of conjunctive participles and periphrastic verbal constructions in both languages, constructions from which an information structure advantage is gained in the way an event sequence is conveyed and the events contrastively focused. In SLM, the affirmative periphrastic construction and its negated counterpart can be analysed as bi-clausal. The explicitly finite negation element marking the auxiliary interrupts its adjacency with the lexical verb. The clause containing the lexical verb, which is non-finite, can be questioned or echoed as an apparent ellipsis, with the finite auxiliary as a potential response. As in SLM, SLP has periphrastic verbal constructions and conjunctive participles, however the separability supporting a bi-clausal analysis is absent in SLP. There are also contrasts in the form taken by participles and in the role played by tense and (non-) finiteness-marking in the two languages. In SLM, the participle in periphrastic constructions is identical in form to the conjunctive participle that appears in temporally-sequenced adjunct clauses, whereas in SLP, the form of the participle contrasts in the two contexts, with the conjunctive participial suffix reflecting the default form in the Portuguese lexifier. In SLM, the periphrastic perfect construction consists of a (non-finite) conjunctive participle plus finite auxiliary, whereas in SLP, the verb and the auxiliary have the sametense/finiteness status.