Sinhala „wage‟ as an Epistemic Modal.

Abstract

"wage‟ is the semantic resemblance of „seem‟ in English. Therefore, can one categorize "wage‟ as a raising predicate? The construction known as subject-to-subject raising, proposed for verbs such as seem or appear, relates pairs of sentences which differ by taking an infinitival, or sentential complement. In the plethora of research, especially in the South Asian languages research on raising predicates in Sinhala language is a frail thus a timely topic to be discussed in terms of linguistics enrichment of the language. Thus, the study deals with analyzing „wage‟ the Sinhala semantic equivalent of „seem‟ in English as a raising predicate. The research was carried out as qualitative research because secondary data from literature had to be analyzed in search of patterns. Firstly, “wage” was analyzed against the constructions of raising predicate. Since it only met with one criteria of a raising predicate, it was concluded that „wage‟ is not a raising predicate. Secondly, „wage‟ was compared with the features of focus marking mainly adopted through the works of Kariyakarawana (1998). It was compared against C-Focus, E-Focus and Phonological Focus particles such as „da‟, „lu‟, „thamai‟, and with the negation construction. Though it showed positive relations with the focus particles, in the case of negation it did not show any compatibility with the negations of a focus marker in Sinhala. Thus, finally it was set against the characteristics of modals. The distribution of modals in Sinhala is somewhat informal and they can be attached to any lexical category in an affixation pattern. Like the epistemic modals „lu‟ and „ne‟„athi‟, „they bring out the possibility, doubt and it fits both the constructions of declarative and negative sentence constructions of epistemic modals. Thus, it was apparent that „wage‟ can be categorized as an epistemic modal not a raising predicate though it has the semantic resemblance of „seem‟ in English.