Morphological Typology and the Complexity of Nominal Morphology in Sinhala

1. INTRODUCTION. Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Sri Lanka by approximately 13 million people, has a complicated system of nominal morphology. Number marking on nouns in the nominative case is based on a series of twelve noun classes partially determined by animacy. The marking of definiteness and case on nouns is simpler in some respects because the shape of these markers are determined only by number and animacy without reference to the noun classes that are apparent in the system of number marking. However, in other respects the case marking paradigm is more complicated than the number marking system in that is includes both clitics and postpositions. So in order to adequately describe the case marking of nouns, it is necessary to recognize three levels of structure (affix, clitic, and postposition) as number, animacy, and definiteness interact with case. One of the traditional morphological typology measures, the index of fusion, can capture some of this structural complexity, but the result is unsatisfying in that the language is placed somewhere toward the fusional end of the continuum. I argue that the concepts of phonological and grammatical word categories offer an alternative way of deconstructing the notion of fusion which captures the structural complexity of Sinhala with a more precise level of detail.