LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:6 June 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Copyright © 2012
M. S. Thirumalai
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1. Introduction

Case is a grammatical category and its value reflects the grammatical function performed by a noun or pronoun in a sentence. Nouns take different inflected forms depending upon what case they are in. In other words, case can be defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they have with their head forms (Clackson, 2007: 91).

However, in Tamil noun structure, various suffixes are added to the noun bases to indicate different kind of relationships between the noun and the other parts of sentence. This kind of forms helps to explain the syntactic relationship between noun and verb in a sentence. So the case formation is done by adding a suffix or a postposition or sometimes the word order. The addition of suffixes in Tamil sometimes requires certain phonological changes to explain the concerned forms. There are at least 8 productive case forms like objective case, instrumental case, sociative case, dative case, locative case, ablative case, possessive case and purposive case.

However, in some of the grammatical descriptions nominative and vocative forms are included as case forms though their function is more syntactical, functional or contextual.

2. Objectives of the study

The main objectives are:

i) To present a well formalized morphological description for the noun structures in Malaysian Spoken Tamil with particular reference to case forms.

ii) To present a sociolinguistic description of all the case forms which show variations conditioned by different social variables in the formation and occurrence of case forms in the Malaysian Spoken Tamil of the younger generation.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Pawathy A/P Nalliannan
Faculty of Language and Linguistics
University Of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
pawathykailasam@yahoo.com
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