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Abstract:
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This paper analyzes the basic syntactic patterns of Sinhala in contrast with Hindi and Nepalese, its fellow Indo-European language family, and makes explicit the uniqueness and richness of Sinhala non-volitional expressions. Further, this paper clarifies the characteristics of non-volitional expressions in other Asian languages from a typological perspective. This paper shows that, in terms of the basic syntactic patterns of non-volitional expressions, Hindi and Nepalese are less like Sinhala and more like the eastern Asian languages, such as Japanese and Korean. Further, this study shows the relation between non-volitionality and case marking in Sinhala and clarifies the uniqueness of this relation to Sinhala.
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