The Making of Vernacular Singapore English: System, Transfer, and FilterSingapore English is a focal point across the many subfields of linguistics, as its semantic, syntactic and phonetic/phonological qualities tell us a great deal about what happens when very different types of language come together. Sociolinguists are also interested in the relative status of Singapore English compared to other languages in the country. This book charts the history of Singapore English and explores the linguistic, historical and social factors that have influenced the variety as it is spoken today. It identifies novel grammatical features of the language, discusses their structure and function, and traces their origins to the local languages of Singapore. It places grammatical system and usage at the core of the analysis, and shows that introspective and corpus data are complementary. This study will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on language contact, world varieties of English, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. |
Contents
The ecology of Singapore English | 15 |
Grammatical system and substratum transfer | 37 |
Topic prominence empty categories and the bare conditional | 67 |
Substratum lexifier and typological universals | 102 |
Frequency usage and the circumscriptive role of the lexifier | 130 |
Other editions - View all
The Making of Vernacular Singapore English: System, Transfer, and Filter Zhiming Bao Limited preview - 2015 |
The Making of Vernacular Singapore English: System, Transfer, and Filter Zhiming Bao No preview available - 2019 |
Common terms and phrases
already analysis aspectual aspectual categories aspectual system Baba Malay Bazaar Malay Cantonese Chinese community clause COMP conditional constraint construction contact ecology contact language contact linguistics context convergence convergence-to-substratum corpus deontic dialects emergence empty categories epistemic examples exemplar exponenced expressed frequency function give passive grammar of Singapore grammatical features grammatical system grammaticalization Hokkien ICE-SIN and ICE-GB inchoative interpretation intuition kena kena passive language contact Lefebvre LexFilter lexical lexifier language lingua franca linguistic substratum Mandarin meaning mesti modal morphosyntactic exponence Mufwene native speakers null object Peranakans percent perfective aspect pidgins and creoles Platt Private Dialogue productivity pronominal pronoun quantification reduplication relexification sentences Singapore English Singaporean subcorpora substrate feature substrate language substrate-derived substratist substratum influence substratum transfer syntactic SysTrans Table Teochew theory tokens topic structure typological universal quantification usage pattern usage-based V-en V-ing variable verb verbal reduplication vernacular weak violators wh-movement xiānshēng yǒu Zhangsan