MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF SRI LANKAN YOUTUBE ADVERTISEMENTS

Abstract

In Sri Lanka, the trend of YouTube advertising has gained prominence as one of the most productive ways of promoting productions, closely intertwined with the utilization of morphological processes within the Sri Lankan English (SLE) linguistic landscape. In the context of marketing goods and services, producers use morphological processes as a strategy to attract customers while popularizing advertisements. This study examines how frequently are morphological processes utilized in SLE within the context of YouTube advertising and aims to analyze the morphological processes used in Sri Lankan English concerning the selected YouTube advertisements and to identify the frequency of these morphological processes. Moreover, this paper investigates the effective usage of these processes by YouTube advertisers. In this study, data were collected using primary and secondary data collection methods. After conducting a comparable observation, four types of varying YouTube videos were selected for this investigation. Among the selected advertisements, compounds, borrowings, reduplications, and tags and expressions were widely used in SLE. Sinhala being the superstrate of Sri Lanka, its influence over these processes is significant. On the other hand, the co-existence of English and Sinhala languages influences the creation of new words which ultimately results in code-mixing and code-switching. The findings of the study reveal that compounding is the most productive and frequently used morphological process in the selected YouTube advertisements. The overall study depicts that the compounding and borrowings have coined new and unique words in SLE and most of the words are shaped by the influence of the Sinhala language. Thereby, YouTube advertisers use morphological processes to familiarize products among the community with the aid of language.