Particle Movement in Sinhala and Japanese

In Sinhala (Indo-Aryan, Sri Lanka), focus and question constructions are formed with particles that attach to the focused phrase or question word. Although on the surface these particles are usually clause-internal, this paper presents evidence that these particles move before interpretation to the periphery of the clause.

Along with strictly Sinhala-internal evidence, we will also consider evidence from Japanese, which (I will argue) shows the hypothesized particle movement in the surface syntax. That is, Sinhala and Japanese form a minimal pair with respect to whether the movement shown in Figure 1 is “overt” (Japanese) or “covert” (Sinhala). To forestall any disappointment, let me say up front that I will not have any concrete proposal as to exactly where the particle moves to, although I take up the issue in some detail in sections 10 and 13.

The syntactic structure of focus and question constructions in Sinhala has been discussed in the previous literature, as has the potential similarity to Japanese. This paper builds on these works to varying degrees, primarily on Gair (1983), Gair and Sumangala (1991), Sumangala (1992), Kishimoto (1991, 1992, 1997, 1998), and Whitman (1997), Yanagida (1995).