Search

The use of the adverb already in Colloquial Singapore English has long been known as one of the most readily recognizable features defining the contact dialect, marking aspectual nuances such as anterior, completive, inchoative and inceptive functions, as noted by Bao (2005, 2015). Recent observations note that the uses of already as an inchoative marker (distinguishing the adverb as an iamitive) are more frequently found than completive uses across a small, synchronic sample of speakers (Teo 2019). It is perhaps less often recognized, though, that the aspectual use of already co-exists with the variable marking for past tense in Singlish (Ho & Platt 1993), and that both the aspectual adverb and the past tense may be seen to co-occur in the same construction. The frequency of already in its various functions is examined across two corpora, and the relative frequency of completive vs. non-completive functions is quantified diachronically. It is hypothesized that, rather than grammaticalizing onwards to become a past tense marker, as is predictable for some Portuguese creole iamitives (ya ‘already’) (Clements 2006), already is becoming increasingly restricted in its functional range in today’s Singlish, and that its perfect and completive functions may be at a stage of selective renovation by the use of the past tense in Standard Singapore English.

Imposition, a general mechanism of contact-induced change that manifests itself in creole formation, second language acquisition, and even language attrition (Winford 2013), is a result of unequal dominance in a multilingual’s languages, whereby linguistic features from an individual’s more dominant language are transferred to a less dominant language (van Coetsem 1988). In order to flesh out how imposition operates in multilinguals, this study compares the differences between Singaporean Chinese and Malay speakers in their use of already in Colloquial Singapore English. Based on sociolinguistic interview data from twelve Chinese and eight Malay individuals, it is found that Chinese and Malay speakers differ primarily in two ways: (1) the preferred syntactic position for already; (2) the frequency of different contexts that already appears in. By integrating theories from cognitive linguistics and findings from psycholinguistic studies, this paper argues that ‘equivalent’ constructions across two grammatical systems within a multilingual’s mind is a key channel through which imposition operates. To support this argument, differences between the speech of Chinese and Malay speakers are shown to be motivated by the presence or absence of ‘equivalent’ or parallel constructions.

This study adoptsNelson’s (2014)methodological framework to investigate core and peripheral lexical bundles (i.e. recurrent multi-word sequences) in conversation, using data from the British, Canadian, Singapore, and Hong Kong components of theInternational Corpus of English(ICE). The overlap and non-overlap comparisons reveal (dis)similarities in the use of bundles across the four World Englishes (WEs). Our findings suggest that in terms of discourse building blocks, the more advanced a variety is according toSchneider’s (2007)Dynamic Model of New Englishes, the more lexical bundles it shares with the common core in conversation. Canadian English (CanE) shares the most common ground with British English (BrE). As a nascent variety, Hong Kong English (HKE) differs most from BrE, while Singapore English falls between CanE and HKE. Though the results do not correlate with Schneider’s Dynamic Model at the level of recurring chunks, they allow us to test predictions of WEs models. Quantitative and qualitative analyses enable the identification of bundles with significantly high frequency in each regional variety, thus enriching comparative research of WEs.

This study examined the English accents of English-Malay bilinguals in Singapore to ascertain whether language dominance was a determinant of accent variation in Singapore English, with a hypothesis that a Malay-dominant bilingual would have more ethnic-specific features than an English-dominant one. Ten English-Malay bilinguals – five English-dominant and five Malay-dominant – who differed greatly in their language dominance took part in this study. In an ethnic discriminability task that involved 60 naïve raters, Malay-dominant bilinguals were significantly more often correctly identified as ethnically Malay and were rated as having a significantly more perceivable Malay-accented English accent, while those who were English-dominant had an English accent that lacked ethnic-specific features so much so that naïve raters, including raters who were English-Malay bilinguals, were less able to identify the speakers as ethnically Malay. The results of this study indicate that early sequential bilinguals or simultaneous bilinguals of the same two languages need not have similar accents. The findings also suggest that language dominance is a determinant of accent variation in Singapore English, at least for the English-Malay bilinguals.

This article reviews Negation and Contact: With Special Focus on Singapore English EUR 95.00978-9-02725-948-6

Singapore English and Hong Kong English started out as contact varieties and developed into ESL varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Both varieties show a similar contact ecology (Chinese), but differ in their socio-institutional status in the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2003, 2007). By analyzing innovative verb-to-noun conversion in these two varieties, and comparing them to British English, this study shows that despite the obvious similarities in substratum, the usage frequency of conversion in both varieties differs considerably. These findings, similar to — most recently — Deshors (2014) and Gilquin (2015), call into question the established notion of ESL in general and the status of SgE and HKE as ESL varieties in particular. In order to accurately reflect contemporary language use, it is reasonable to conceptualize the notion of ESL as a continuum and to situate HKE and SgE at opposite ends.

This paper is primarily concerned with the use of spatiotemporal metaphor in English. In particular, the interpretations of spatiotemporal metaphors in a nativized variety of English, Singapore English, will be examined. On the basis of morphosyntax, Singapore English and English spatiotemporal metaphors do not differ. The difference is only apparent in the usage of these terms. This paper examines Chinese influence in the temporal interpretations of English and show that there is substrate influence from Chinese languages on the interpretations of Singapore English spatiotemporal terms.

Offensive language use in Singapore’s languacultures appears to be underpinned by cultural norms and values embraced by most if not all Singaporeans. Interviews with local informants and perusal of Singapore’s linguistic and cultural resources led to the identification of eight offensive words and phrases deemed representative of Singaporean coarseness. This set was narrowed down to a smaller set of common words and phrases, all Chinese Hokkien, all culturally laden. The finding that, although originally Hokkien, all of them are accessible not only to the Chinese-speaking population but also to speakers of Singapore Malay, Singapore Tamil, and Singapore English is compelling. The words and phrases studied in this paper are full-fledged members of the lexicon of these local non-Chinese languages, without loss or distortion of meaning. They are accepted as part of the local linguistic scene and of local cultural knowledge. At least in certain situations, people of different ethnic backgrounds who live and work together can rely on them as a testament of common identity which, in a curious way, gives voice to the sociocultural homogeneity this society unrelentingly pursues.

The classification of English as a native (ENL), second (ESL) and foreign (EFL) language is traditionally mapped onto Kachru’s (1985) Inner, Outer and Expanding circles, respectively. This paper addresses the divide upheld between these different varietal types. We explore the preposition into using comparable corpora for all three varietal types: the International Corpus of English (ICE) for Inner and Outer Circle varieties, and a comparable Corpus of Dutch English to represent the Expanding Circle. Our results show that the least institutionalised varieties (Hong Kong and Dutch English) are the most dissimilar to the ENL varieties, and the most institutionalised variety (Singapore English) is the most similar. We also compare our results for the Corpus of Dutch English to the Dutch component of the International Corpus of Learner English. While the latter patterns with other learner varieties, the Dutch English corpus patterns with ESL varieties, suggesting that “Expanding Circle” and “EFL” are not synonymous.

The study of learner language and that of indigenized varieties are growing areas of English-language corpus-linguistic research, which are shaped by two current trends: First, the recognition that more rigorous methodological approaches are urgently needed (with few exceptions, existing work is based on over-/under-use frequency counts that fail to unveil complex non-native linguistic patterns); second, the collective effort to bridge an existing “paradigm gap” (Sridhar & Sridhar 1986) between EFL and ESL research. This paper contributes to these developments by offering a multifactorial analysis of seventeen lexical verbs in the dative alternation in speech and writing of German/French learners and Hong Kong/India/Singapore English speakers. We exemplify the advantages of hierarchical mixed-effects modeling, which allows us to control for speaker and verb-specific effects, but also for the hierarchical structure of the corpus data. Second, we address the theoretical question of whether EFL and ESL represent discrete English varieties or a continuum.

Creoles (here including expanded pidgins) are commonly viewed as being more analytic than their lexifiers and other languages in terms of grammatical marking. The purpose of the study reported in this article was to examine the validity of this view by measuring the frequency of analytic (and synthetic) markers in corpora of two different English-lexified creoles — Tok Pisin and Hawai‘i Creole — and comparing the quantitative results with those for other language varieties. To measure token frequency, 1,000 randomly selected words in each creole corpus were tagged with regard to word class, and categorized as being analytic, synthetic, both analytic and synthetic, or purely lexical. On this basis, an Analyticity Index and a Syntheticity Index were calculated. These were first compared to indices for other languages and then to L1 varieties of English (e.g. standard British and American English and British dialects) and L2 varieties (e.g. Singapore English and Hong Kong English). Type frequency was determined by the size of the inventories of analytic and synthetic markers used in the corpora, and similar comparisons were made. The results show that in terms of both token and type frequency of grammatical markers, the creoles are not more analytic than the other varieties. However, they are significantly less synthetic, resulting in much higher ratios of analytic to synthetic marking. An explanation for this finding relates to the particular strategy for grammatical expansion used by individuals when the creoles were developing.

This paper discusses supplementary roles played by Bazaar Malay and Baba Malay in the genesis of wh-questions in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). CSE has three options for wh-questions: (a) full wh-movement, (b) partial wh-movement, and (c) wh-in-situ, just like Bazaar Malay and Baba Malay. Whereas options (a) and (c) arose under pressure from English and Chinese, option (b) apparently challenges the Sinitic substrate hypothesis on CSE for two reasons. Firstly, neither Cantonese nor Hokkien possesses partial wh-movement. Secondly, it is mysterious how the apparent Malayic pattern could have entered the pool of CSE features within the predominantly Sinitic contact environment. This paper proposes that partial wh-movement was added onto the CSE grammar as an evolutionary ‘adaptive’ trait from Malay which survived selective Sinitic pressures due to congruence between Malay and Chinese. Both Cantonese and Hokkien possess a wh-topicalization structure, which is sufficiently similar to the partial structure in Malay. As a result, the former served as the template for Chinese speakers to analyze the latter as a congruence structure in the emerging variety. This result supports the recent view that typological congruence between Sinitic and Malay must be taken into account in any discussion of the origin/development of CSE grammar.

This paper investigates international responses to Singapore English (SgE), in terms of both intelligibility and attitudes toward the speaker, and compares it to responses to American English (AmE). It surveys 200 respondents from over 20 countries as they listen to a set of 15 sound recordings, including read SgE, spontaneous SgE, and read AmE. The results suggest that the intelligibility of SgE and AmE does differ between informants from different regions. However, the intelligibility of the test stimuli does not correlate simply to positive and negative attitudes. While SgE elicits generally positive attitudes, what is interesting is that the judgments of respondents from South-East Asia and East Asia are often more negative than those of English speakers of Inner Circle varieties. This seems to suggest not only an impenetrable mindset of these traditionally “non-native” English speakers, who seem to be still clamoring to speak an idealized “standard”, but also an inferiority complex over their own varieties of English.

This paper looks at variation in the expression of perfect meaning in Asian Englishes (Hong Kong, India, Singapore and the Philippines) as represented in the spoken component of the International Corpus of English. Findings confirm the existence of levelling between the present perfect and simple past in these varieties, and that the tendency of the present perfect to lose ground to the preterite is more pronounced in these New Englishes than in British English, especially in the expression of recent past. The occurrence of other variants in the corpus is accounted for in terms of the influence of the respective substrate languages, cognitive constraints characteristic of language-contact situations, pragmatic contextual factors such as the scant use of adverbial support, and, especially, diffusion from the input language, which is an earlier variety of spoken, non-standard English. Relevant intravarietal differences are also discussed and attributed to the different phases of development in which the four varieties currently find themselves.

In an earlier study (Ziegeler 2007), it was emphasised that it was redundant to discuss construction coercion in the face of more transparent mechanisms of cognitive pragmatics such as metonymy, and within the sphere of grammaticalisation studies. The present paper extends such arguments, including examples of (apparent) coercion of count-to-mass nouns in Colloquial Singaporean English, and, comparing the data with examples of noun referentiality in earlier historical English, illustrates that what on the surface may appear to be coercion is just a sub-type of metonymy, involved in the metaphorical generalisation of constructions across lexical-syntactic boundaries. Comparison with retention and unresolved mismatch in grammaticalisation is also considered.

Early works on Singapore and Malaysian English used to consider them as a single homogeneous entity based on their shared history as previous British colonies. However, since 1965, both Malaysia and Singapore have been independent from each other. It is interesting to investigate, some four decades post-independence, how different the English speech patterns of Malaysians and Singaporeans have become taking into account the different language planning policies undertaken by both countries. This paper compares one particular aspect of pronunciation, i.e. the vowel qualities and durations of both varieties. The formants of the vowels of the read speech of five male and five female speakers of Malaysian English (MalE) are compared to an equivalent sample of speakers of Singapore English (SgE) in order to compare the vowel qualities between the two varieties. In particular, we compare the vowel quadrilateral space of MalE in comparison with SgE. Vowel durations are also measured for vowels produced in citation forms only. It is found that SgE speakers did maintain some distinctions between the long/short vowel pairs in terms of duration while the MalE speakers tended to conflate the long/short vowel pairs durationally.

We might expect Brunei English to be non-rhotic, as the Englishes of both Singapore and Malaysia are non-rhotic and Brunei has strong ethnic, historical, economic and cultural ties with those two countries. The current study compares the R-colouring of read data from female undergraduates in Brunei and Singapore, and it finds that the Brunei data is substantially more rhotic than that of Singapore. It is suggested that this is for two reasons: the main indigenous language of Brunei is Brunei Malay, which is rhotic; and Brunei English is at an earlier stage of development than Singapore English and so it is more susceptible to outside influences, particularly from American media.

Bazaar Malay is a Malay-lexified pidgin with a Chinese substratum spoken in the marketplace of Singapore (and elsewhere in Southeast Asia). Although it is no longer a lingua franca in Singapore today, it is nevertheless still spoken by older Singaporeans. Like Chinese and Malay, Bazaar Malay is a topic-prominent language. We document three types of the Bazaar Malay topic construction and show that they are identical to the topic structures found in Chinese. The degree of convergence in the topic construction between Chinese and Bazaar Malay, and between Chinese and Singapore English, supports the systemic view of substratum transfer.

This study is concerned with the occasional lack of verbal past tense marking in Singapore English, which has been described both as evidence for morphological change and as a phonological consequence of final plosive deletion. Based on a corpus of spoken educated Singapore English, it is investigated whether the lack of past tense marking in verbs in a past tense context is due primarily to morphological or phonological factors and whether word frequency influences the rate of past tense marking. The results are interpreted as evidence for a phonological basis of most unmarked verb forms in Singapore English and suggest a shift in the function of the present tense. They further imply that past tense marking in Singapore English varies with sociolinguistic factors.

In this paper, we present paradoxical properties of the discourse particle hor in Singapore English and attempt to resolve them. Hor has been described as an attenuator of illocutionary force, which is used to convert statements and commands into questions and requests. We provide a new observation that it can also be used as a booster of illocutionary force to make strong statements and demands. We claim that these paradoxical properties are consequences of hor’s nature to mark a nonstandard discourse context in which there is an asymmetry in epistemic or deontic authority between speaker and hearer vis-à-vis a proposition. In a context where epistemic / deontic authority for a proposition lies with the speaker, hor serves as a booster of illocutionary force. In a context where such authority rests with the hearer, hor serves as an attenuator.

Recent research has aimed to integrate the investigation of vernacular universals in native English dialects with variation in postcolonial varieties of English and cross-linguistic typology (Chambers 2004; Kortmann 2004). This article assumes that any search for universals in bilingual varieties must include an assessment of the grammatical conditioning of features and a comparison with the relevant substrates. Comparing Indian English and Singapore English, I examine three proposed candidates for English universals (Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2004), all of which show some presence in the two varieties — past tense omission, over-extension of the progressive, and copula omission. Past tense omission is found to be genuinely similar in the two varieties and accounted for by typological parallels in the substrates, whereas progressive morphology use and copula omission are found to be divergent in the two varieties and accounted for by typological differences in the substrates. All three variable systems are explicable as substrate-superstrate interactions, tempering claims of universality in both distribution and explanation.

Many New Englishes are spoken in what can often be considered multilingual contexts in which typologically diverse languages come into contact. In several Asian contexts, one typological feature that is prominent in the multilingual contact situation (the “ecology”) is tone. Given that tone is recognized as an areal feature and is acquired easily by languages in contact, the question that arises is how this is manifested in the prosody of these New Englishes. Recent work has shown that contact languages, including English varieties, evolving in an ecology where tone languages are present do indeed combine aspects of tone languages. This paper attempts to go a step further, in suggesting not only that such varieties should not be viewed as aberrant in comparison to “standard” English but recognized as having their own prosodic system partly due to substrate typology, but also that in the consideration of New Englishes — here, Asian (but also African) Englishes — the traditional view of English as a stress / intonation language need to be revisited and revised, to consider some New Englishes as tone languages. Singapore English (SgE) is presented as a case in point, with the presence of tone demonstrated in the set of SgE particles acquired from Cantonese, at the level of the word, as well as in the intonation contour which moves in a series of level steps. A comparison is then made with Hong Kong English, another New English in a tone-language-dominant ecology, with a consideration of typological comparability as well as difference due to the dynamic nature of SgE’s ecology.

We explore two aspects of English spoken by native speakers of Thai: rhythm and the vowel system, and compare each to the substrate language Thai, to target varieties of English, and to two New Englishes in Asia. Data was collected from a group of Thai speakers who participated in an interview in English, and who read a Thai paragraph, and English words, sentences and a paragraph. For rhythm, we measured the “Pairwise Variability Index” (nPVI, Grabe and Low 2002) and the proportion of time in an utterance devoted to vowels (%V, Ramus, Nespor and Mehler 1999) of Thai read speech, and English spontaneous and read speech. We find that the English of Thai speakers had stress-timed values of high nPVI, like Thai and British English (BrE), and low %V, like BrE but not Thai. Neither measure of rhythm resembled New Englishes’ more syllable-timed lower nPVI and high %V. The vowel system of Thai English revealed transfers of both quality and quantity from the substrate, resulting in a system distinct from British, American, and New Englishes.

This paper looks at the emergence of Asian English varieties in terms of the evolution of new grammatical features. I propose that, in order to reach a thorough understanding of how the unique combination of grammatical features that define specific Asian Englishes come about, we must approach these features from a typological and evolutionary perspective which allows us to contrast them not only with Standard English varieties but also with the Asian languages with which these come into contact. As restructured vernaculars, Asian English varieties are de facto contact languages, and, as such, evolve as a consequence of selection of features from a multilingual pool. In this pool, features of Asian varieties play a significant role in determining the output grammar and must therefore be appreciated in their own right. In order to illustrate these points, I introduce an evolutionary view of contact language formation, and I present a set of features typical of Singlish, which are all instances of replication of Asian, not English, features

This paper investigates the grammar and usage of one in Singapore English, which exhibits the influence of both Chinese and English, the two dominant languages in the multilingual ecology of Singapore English, as well as the influence of relevant linguistic universals. The grammar of one is essentially the grammar of Chinese de filtered through the morphosyntax of English one. The corpus data show that some one forms which are judged acceptable by native-speaker informants have nevertheless low frequency of use. I argue that usage plays an important role in the success of contact-induced grammatical innovation, and propose an exemplar-based model of relexification that provides a satisfactory explanation of the grammatical properties and usage patterns of one in Singapore English.

The present paper investigates the strength of verb-construction associations across various New Englishes on the basis of comparable corpora. In contrast to previous studies into verb complementation in New Englishes, we start off from three basic constructions in English — the intransitive, the monotransitive and the ditransitive construction — and analyse the co-occurrences of the three constructions and a wide range of verbs. The present study is based on the Hong Kong, the Indian, and the Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) because the three varieties represent markedly different stages in the process of the evolution of New Englishes with British English as the historical input variety. Our quantitative analysis includes multiple distinctive collexeme analyses for the different varieties. The results show, inter alia, that, firstly, processes of structural nativisation of New Englishes can also be observed at the level of verb-construction associations, which can be subsumed under the notion of “collostructional nativisation”, and that, secondly, there are identifiable intervarietal differences between British English and New Englishes as well as between individual New Englishes. In general, there is a correlation between the evolutionary stage of a New English variety and its collostructional nativisation: The more advanced a New English variety is in the developmental cycle, the more dissimilar its collostructional preferences are to British English.

This study investigates a few Anglo English and Singapore English tags. The focus is on their meaning and the ways of thinking they reflect, rather than their forms and functions. The study contrasts the so-called Anglo English tag questions and the Singapore English tag is it? and tries to show that their semantic and pragmatic differences relate to differences in ways of thinking in the two cultures. For the purposes of this research, meaning is articulated in a paraphrase couched in natural semantic metalanguage (NSM), which comprises a set of empirically established semantic primes and a universal grammar.

This paper provides an acoustic description of the vowels of Brunei English (BrunE). Ten female BrunE speakers were recorded reading The North Wind and the Sun (NWS) passage. The formant values of the eleven monophthong vowels and the rate of change (ROC) of the diphthong /eI/ were measured and compared with the data of seven British English (BrE) speakers and also the results of similar studies on Singapore English (SgE). It was found that BrunE shares some common features with SgE as both groups do not distinguish between /i˜/ and /I/, /e/ and /æ/, and /f˜/ and /#/. The high back vowels of BrunE, however, are unlike the SgE vowels. Whereas in SgE /u˜/ and /~/ are fully back, in BrunE these two vowels are fronted, so they are similar to the vowels of the BrE speakers. The data also shows that BrunE /f˜/ is more open and less back than BrE /f˜/. For /eI/, the average ROC for Bruneian speakers is considerably less negative than that for British speakers, which indicates that in BrunE, just as in SgE, this vowel is less diphthongal than its counterpart in BrE.

A common feature of Singaporean English, and found to a lesser extent in British and US English, is the “conventionalised scenario” (Goldberg 1995); i.e. a causative construction in which an intermediate causee is neither expressed nor necessarily recoverable from context and common ground, e.g. You cut your hair, in which the action is normally attributed to another, unexpressed participant. The present study provides written data on the use of conventionalised scenarios in Singapore English and explains their link with competing resultative constructions (e.g. You had/got your hair cut) in terms of an ACTION FOR RESULT grammatical metonymy. In this metonymy, the passival resultative construction is substituted with an active‑voice construction and the causer now stands for both the causer and causee together. Contact features in the Singaporean dialect, relating particularly to local Chinese languages and/or Malay, may influence the distributional extent of conventionalised scenarios, as may the overgeneralisation of the semantic constraints on its usage.

Colloquial Singapore English has a novel conditional construction in which the conditional clause is not marked morphosyntactically, and must precede the consequent clause. We show that Singapore English, like Chinese, the main substrate language, is topic prominent, and the novel conditional construction is a direct consequence of this new typological status. We analyze the unmarked conditional clause as topic, a basic syntactic position in topic prominent languages. Our analysis shows that substrate influence is systemic: the entire cluster of properties associated with topic prominence is transferred from Chinese to Singapore English.

In the past, the vowels of Singapore English (SgE) have often been described with reference to British English (BrE). However, certain idiosyncratic patterns are now emerging, and these often cannot be predicted by referring to any other varieties of English. The vowels in words such as egg, beg, poor, pure, won, one and the first syllable of absorb and abroad are investigated from the data of 38 speakers, and it is shown that a new standard of SgE pronunciation is emerging for the great majority of speakers.

The concurrent trends of globalisation and ‘indigenisation’ affecting the English language (varieties) around the world pose some interesting questions for language planning and reform issues (e.g. Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1994; Crystal, 1997). With this project we examine the impact of these competing trends on corpus planning relating to gender-inclusive language use in the Englishes of Singapore and the Philippines, categorised as ‘outer-circle’ Englishes by Kachru (1992,1997). In this paper we present some findings on aspects of gender-inclusive language reform based on an analysis of the student and academic texts in the Singapore and Philippine components of the International Corpus of English [ICE]1. Education, particularly higher education, has been identified as a leading site of contact with and trajectories of change for gender-inclusive language reform. We focus in particular on one of the main features of gender-inclusive language reform: generic pronouns. The results of the ICE corpus analysis suggest that adoption of gender-inclusive and gender-neutral generic pronouns is not yet profiled in these ‘outer-circle’ Englishes. Generic he remains the pervasive generic pronoun in the student and published academic writing in the Singapore English corpus. The Philippines data reveal a similar trend although there is some emergence of s/he forms as the preferred gender-inclusive alternative.

In this paper we try to crack one of the hardest and most intriguing chestnuts in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics and to identify the meaning of the celebrated Singaporean particle lah — the hallmark of Singapore English. In pursuing this goal, we investigate the use of lah and seek to identify its meaning by trying to find a paraphrase in ordinary language which would be substitutable for lah in any context. In doing so, we try to enter the speakers’ minds, and as John Locke (1959 [1691]:99) urged in his pioneering work on particles, “observe nicely” the speakers’ “postures of the mind in discoursing”. At the same time, we offer a general model for the investigation of discourse markers and show how the methodology based on the “NSM” semantic theory allows the analyst to link pragmatics, via semantics, with the study of cognition.

The formants of the conversational vowels of five male and five female Singapore English (SgE) speakers are measured and compared with comparable measurements of British English (BrE) in order to gain a comprehensive view of the vowel space of Singaporean speakers and to determine which of the vowel distinctions of BrE are not maintained in SgE. It is found that the distinctions between /iː/ and /ɪ/ and also /e/ and /æ/ are not maintained in SgE, and any distinction between /ɔː/ and /ɒ/ is small. It is also found that SgE /uː/ is more back than BrE /uː/. It is further suggested that the fewer number of vowel contrasts in SgE does not contribute to much loss of intelligibility.

1. List of contributors 2. Introduction: Linguistic superdiversity in educational institutions (by Duarte, Joana) 3. Capturing superdiversity 4. Using correspondence analysis to model immigrant multilingualism over time (by Schrauf, Robert W.) 5. Capturing diversity: Linguistic land- and soundscaping (by Scarvaglieri, Claudio) 6. Measuring language diversity in urban ecosystems (by Peukert, Hagen) 7. Language acquisition and practice 8. Foreign language acquisition in heritage speakers: The acquisition of articles in L3-English by German-Turkish bilinguals (by Kupisch, Tanja) 9. Heteroglossia in English complementary schools (by Blackledge, Adrian) 10. Enough is enough: The heuristics of authenticity in superdiversity (by Blommaert, Jan) 11. The primary classroom as a superdiverse hetero-normative space (by Spotti, Massimiliano) 12. Assessing narrative development in bilingual first language acquisition: What can we learn from monolingual norms? (by Kapia, Enkeleida) 13. Examples of language contact and change 14. Detecting historical continuity in a linguistically diverse urban area: The present perfect in modern Singapore English (by Davydova, Julia) 15. Four decades of study of synchronic variation in varieties of Dutch. A sketch (by Hinskens, Frans L.) 16. Language contact in heritage languages in the Netherlands (by Aalberse, Suzanne) 17. Chinese and globalization (by Kroon, Sjaak) 18. Author index 19. Subject index

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Kreativität und Sprachplanung am Beispiel des Indischen und des Singapurer Englisch Dieser Beitrag befaßt sich mit Kreativität im Indischen und im Singapurer Englisch. Über-einstimmungen und Unterschiede zwischen sprachlicher und literarischer Kreativität in diesen beiden Varietäten werden betrachtet. Die gefundenen Unterschiede werden im wesentlichen mit den Auswirkungen der Sprachplanungspolitik und ihrer Umsetzung in den beiden Ländern erklärt. Konsequenzen für die Theorie der Sprachplanung werden untersucht. RESUMO Kreivo kaj lingvoplanado kaze de la bharata kaj la singapura angla lingvo Ĉi tiu referaĵo ekzamenas la kreivon en la bharata angla kaj la singapura angla. Reliefiĝas la malsamecoj inter la du lingvovariantoj rilate la lingvan kreivon kaj la literaturan kreivon. Oni hipotezas ke tiujn diferencojn grandparte estigas la malsamaj lingvoplanadaj kutimoj en la du landoj. Oni studas iujn sekvojn por la teorio de la lingvoplanado.

1. Language change in contact languages: Grammatical and prosodic considerations: An introduction (by Clements, J. Clancy) 2. Articles 3. The contribution of relexification, grammaticalization, and reanalysis to creole genesis and development (by Lefebvre, Claire) 4. Grammaticalization in creoles: Ordinary and not-so-ordinary cases (by Bruyn, Adrienne) 5. One in Singapore English (by Bao, Zhiming) 6. Contact-induced grammaticalization: Evidence from bilingual acquisition (by Matthews, Stephen) 7. Tone inventories and tune-text alignments: Prosodic variation in 'hybrid' prosodic systems (by Gooden, Shelome) 8. Subsystem interface and tone typology in Papiamentu (by Rivera-Castillo, Yolanda) 9. A twice-mixed creole?: Tracing the history of a prosodic split in the Saramaccan lexicon (by Good, Jeff) 10. Index

1. Acknowledgements 2. Tables & Figures 3. 1. English in Singapore and Singapore English: Background and methodology (by Lim, Lisa) 4. 2. Souding Singaporean (by Lim, Lisa) 5. 3. Nouns and noun phrases (by Wee, Lionel) 6. 4. The verbal cluster (by Fong, Vivienne) 7. 5. Reduplication and discourse particles (by Wee, Lionel) 8. 6.The evolution of Singapore English: Finding the matrix (by Ansaldo, Umberto) 9. References 10. Name Index 11. Subject Index