The Lexical Category Auxiliary in Sinhala

1. INTRODUCTION. This paper discusses whether there are elements in colloquial Sinhala that can be appropriately labeled AUXILIARY verbs, and what evidence there is to motivate such a label. While auxiliaries are thought of as a nearly universal lexical category (Steele 1978), the term is not mentioned in standard works on Sinhala (Gair & Paolillo 1997, Gair 1998), which warrants a closer examination of the existing data. Auxiliaries have been studied under various aspects in a multitude of theoretical frameworks (Heine 1993). Accordingly, there is more than one definition of the term auxiliary. The present study adopts the framework of GRAMMATICIZATION THEORY (Heine & Traugott 1991, Hopper & Traugott 1993) and a definition of auxiliary that presupposes some assumptions of that theory. While it will be argued that grammaticization theory provides a fertile ground for an analysis of the Sinhala data, it needs to be pointed out that by the same token, the theory is subject to modification or even falsification in the event of anomalies (Kuhn 1970) in the observed data. With Heine (1993:70), I take an auxiliary to be 'a linguistic item covering some range of uses along the Verb-to-TAM chain'. To explicate this definition, a frequent, cross-linguistically attested development is that main verbs over time develop into grammatical markers. This development happens gradually, so that main verbs shed some of their lexical meaning and acquire grammatical meaning concerning tense, modality, or aspect, and thus change into auxiliaries. Auxiliaries may grammaticize even further, reduce in form, and ultimately change into affixes. Elements occupying the middle ground of the continuum from main verb to affix can be called auxiliaries. This view acknowledges the fact that it is impossible to cross-linguistically define auxiliaries in terms of necessary and sufficient criteria. It also does not make the claim that auxiliaries are a universal cross-linguistic category. Rather, it makes room for empirical data to decide whether there are elements that exist somewhere along the Verb-to-TAM chain, what their lexical sources are, and how far they are along in the process of grammaticization. The present study uses functional and formal criteria to heuristically arrive at a set of possible candidates for auxiliary status, which are then analyzed in terms of syntactic behavior, morphology, and grammatical function. The database for this study consists of 15 texts that were collected from two consultants in 2004 and 2005, class notes from that time, and additional elicitation …