The Relationship between Case Marking and S, A, and O in Spoken Sinhala

1. INTRODUCTION. In this paper I examine the relationship between case marking and S, A, and O in spoken Sinhala. I will demonstrate that case roles are not assigned on the basis of grammatical relations, but rather they depend on a series of semantic and lexical principles including volitivity, animacy, semantic roles, and definiteness. This paper will furthermore provide evidence for S, A, and O in spoken Sinhala and describe how they pattern together. Case in its most traditional sense refers to the morphological marking by which some languages indicate the grammatical relation of each argument in a clause to a predicate (DeLancey 2001). As in many other Indo-Aryan languages, case markers in spoken Sinhala do not coincide on a one-to-one basis basis with any syntactic roles (Masica 1991:367, Blake 1994). In fact, subjects and objects are not distinguished by case marking in many sentences in Indo-Aryan languages. Both can occur in the nominative case (Masica 1991). In particular the category of subject or lack thereof has been widely discussed for Indo-Aryan languages (Masica 1991), including spoken Sinhala (Gair 1976, 1990). The properties generally associated with subjects, such as agency, animacy, verb agreement, nominative case, control of reflexivity, coreferential deletion, and topicality, do not coincide in the same noun phrase in many Indo-Aryan languages (Masica 1991). Subjects functioning as experiencers rather than as agents and marked with the dative case rather than the nominative are very common in these languages Given the lack of a coherent subject category in spoken Sinhala (Gair 1976) and the multifunctionality of case markers, grammatical relations will be discussed in terms of S, A, and O following the definitions given in Payne (1997), rather than in terms of subjects and objects. According to Payne (1997), S represents the only nominal of a single-argument clause, A describes the most agent-like argument of a multi-argument clause, and O the most patient-like argument of a multi-argument clause. If there is no argument in a clause which can be identified as an agent or patient on a semantic basis, then A and O are assigned to the arguments that are treated morphosyntactically in the same manner as prototypical agents or patients respectively (Payne 1997). Grammatical relations independent of semantic and pragmatic influences are identified by a) case marking, b) participant reference on verbs, and c) constituent order (Payne 1997). In spoken Sinhala, however, case marking is not an indicator …