Construction "Verb + Accusative Case Without Preposition": Acquisition By Sinhala Students

Abstract

The article is devoted to the acquisition of the construction "verb + accusative case without a preposition" by Sinhala-speaking students. A list of main syntactic functions of the accusative case in Russian is presented, and difficulties in language acquisition by Sinhala-speaking student, arising from the difference in language structures, are noted. Russian and Sinhalese (Sinhala) languages, both belonging to the Indo-European language family, differ significantly in typological sense. This is reflected in the differences in case systems – the number and functions of case forms. As regards the accusative case in Russian, besides being the case of a direct object it can also characterize the names functioning as verbal modifiers and, in certain syntactic construction types, as subjects. In Sinhala, the functions of the accusative case are neither limited to the direct object, but they differ considerably from what is the situation in Russian. There are also differences in verbal systems – e.g. the basic (in Russian) classifying category of transitivity is not so significant in Sinhala. The current study dealing with the government model "verb + accusative case without a preposition" may be regarded as a first stage of such systematic study aimed at both deeper understanding of the internal structures of the two languages and improvement of Russian language teaching methods for Sinhala-speaking students. A contrastive study of the two language systems may also be used for improving the methods of Sinhala language teaching for Russian-speaking students.