Referenz-Indizes im Deutschen und im Singhalesischen : eine kontrastive Studie

This study examines various reference devices employed by native speakers of
German and Sinhala in tracking participants in discourse. Firstly, reference
devices available in each language to signal the continuation and/or
discontinuation of referents will discussed in detail. Further, possible
difficulties arising in the process of identifying referents in each language and
various techniques used by native speakers to avoid these problems will also
be discussed. In the final section, the contrastive aspects as well as the unique
features of reference devices of the two languages will be looked into. The
identity of the speaker (first person) and the addressee (second person) is
generally evident in discourse and does not cause much difficulty to decode
who it is being referred to. Hence the focus will be mainly on devices
employed to identify third persons referred to in discourse i.e. personal
pronouns and other devices such as nouns, zero anaphora, honorific and
kinship terms. The role of pronouns in identifying referents in dicourse will be
discussed at length. Further, a sociolinguistic interpretation of reference
devices employed in Sinhala will also be provided because social norms are as
important as formal grammatical rules in this process. This study focuses only
on the spoken variety of the two languages.