“Meh google and give”: Selected Sinhala Discourse Markers in Sri Lankan English

This paper takes a corpus-based approach to analyzing the pragmatic functions of the Sinhala discourse markers aney, meh and ithin in Sri Lankan English (SLE) speech transcripts. Though small in size, a discourse marker’s influence on a sentence and an interaction is both crucial and intriguing. Even though discourse markers have long been a central concern in pragmatics, it is an under-researched area in Sinhala and SLE. All examples of discourse marker used in this study are taken from the private conversations in the spoken section of the Sri Lankan component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SL). This section was selected as it includes colloquial language, where the selected discourse markers are used frequently. The study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, and the data are examined and analyzed both manually and by using AntConc, a corpus analysis toolkit. The analysis finds that the selected discourse markers are multifunctional in SLE speech. Further, the presence of Sinhala discourse markers in SLE demonstrates the influence of bilingualism, and the frequency and ease with which the markers have been able to transfer pragmatic norms between codes.