A linguistic study of the verb phrase in the Sinhala language

A verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit centred on a verb, and typically includes auxiliary verbs, adverbs, objects, and complements. It plays a central role in sentence construction by expressing actions, states, and associated grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, mood, and agreement. Cross-linguistically, VP structures offer valuable insights into the syntactic and morphosyntactic systems of individual languages. This study investigated the structure and patterns of verb phrases in Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the majority population of Sri Lanka. Sinhala verb phrases are morphologically rich, exhibiting verb-final word order, extensive verbal inflection, and auxiliary constructions to encode complex tense- aspect-modality distinctions. The study adopted a qualitative descriptive approach, analyzing both secondary sources and naturally occurring colloquial speech. The corpus comprised ten Sinhala newspapers, ten short story books, and informal conversations across different dialectal and stylistic registers. The research focused on syntactic composition, auxiliary usage, negation, adverbial modification, and verb serialization. The findings revealed nine core structural patterns in Sinhala VPs: (1) simple verb alone, (2) verb with noun phrase, (3) verb with a single adverb, (4) verb with an adverbial phrase, (5) auxiliary verb with noun phrase, (6) auxiliary verb with adverb, (7) VP with particle phrase, (8) auxiliary verb with adverbial phrase, and (9) auxiliary verb with both noun and adverbial phrases. These patterns reflect the syntactic versatility and morphosyntactic complexity of Sinhala and illustrate stylistic variation between formal and informal discourse, particularly in the placement of auxiliaries, modifiers, and particles. This study contributes to the understanding of Sinhala verbal syntax and provides a foundation for comparative research in South Asian linguistics and syntactic typology.