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Large-scale collection of lexical-semantic norms for words in a given language has been instrumental in the progress of psycholinguistic research. However, such norms tend to be collected from speakers of the dominant variant or dialect. This research aims to determine if there may be differences across speakers of various dialects of English in the humor of individual words. Engelthaler and Hills (2018, Behavior Research Methods, 50[3], 1116–1124) observed that their humor ratings were most strongly correlated with inverse word frequency: Less frequent words tended to be rated as more humorous. We hypothesized that words that are less frequently occurring in a given English dialect should be perceived as more humorous by speakers of the same dialect. We selected words of relatively higher and lower frequencies across various corpora of North American, British, or Singapore English, and presented these words to participants who were native English speakers of North American, British, or Singapore English. Study 1 compared humor ratings of North Americans and Singaporeans; Study 2 compared humor ratings of North Americans and the British. Analyses of participants' random slope coefficients of frequency extracted from cumulative link mixed-effects models indicated that humor ratings were more strongly (and inversely) associated with the word's frequency in the corpora that aligned with the rater's English dialect. These results provide evidence that people are sensitive to the statistics of their specific language environment, and importantly suggest that creators of lexical-semantic norm databases should consider how the cultural, historical, or sociopolitical context of raters might influence the nature of their ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars consider clause-final adverbs (CFAs) like already, also, and only to be a prominent feature of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), but little is known about their use in present-day CSE. Using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), we investigate patterns of variation involving CFAs and examine whether they are sensitive to factors such as speaker age and gender. We find that clause-final already and only has increased over time, while clause-final also has remained stable. Overall, the results suggest that CFAs are a stable feature of CSE. Variation in the use of CFAs is conditioned by semantic function, age, and gender. Specifically, clause-final already is associated with the inceptive function. Clause-final already and also are more likely to be used by younger speakers, while clause-final also and only are more likely to be used by males and in all-male conversational settings respectively. We suggest that these patterns are due to present-day English-Mandarin bilingualism, increasingly positive attitudes toward CSE, and National Service for males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary serves to situate the papers published in this special issue by both established and emerging scholars, entitled "Singapore English: Negotiating its place, use and development", against the larger backdrop of research on and the development of English in Singapore from the 1970s to the present, that is, the post-independent era. The paper builds on an earlier paper (Low, 2014), which reviewed the main focal areas of research on Singapore English from the late 1970s to 2010. This paper updates the meta-synthesis of research done to include publications from 2015 to the present. Following on from the trending of the research publications to date, the articles in this special issue add to the research literature on Singapore English in the broad areas of Language Education and Acquisition, Language Planning and Policy and Language in Use. The paper ends with an articulation of possible future lines of inquiry that should be of focal importance on the future development of not just English in Singapore, but with topics that concern any society and country such as the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and its impact on education and the need for education that advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion for a sustainable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singapore has long been known for its plethora of campaigns, including annual campaigns to promote the use of each of the nation's four official languages, viz. English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. The Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) was launched in 2000 amid official concern about Singaporeans' pervasive use of Singlish and implications for the country's global competitiveness. While early campaigns were perceived to be anti-Singlish and highly prescriptive, recent campaigns have been more nuanced, focusing on the usefulness of internationally intelligible English in connecting with others. This paper examines some challenges facing the SGEM today, such as scepticism about whether the campaign is still relevant today, especially when the use of English as a home language among households has more than doubled since the launch of the campaign, and when Singapore has been topping international rankings of English proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its innovative, salient, and robust usage in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), the adverbial use of confirm has largely gone unnoticed. In this paper, we provide morphosyntactic and semantic evidence to show that adverbial confirm behaves like a strongly subjective speaker-oriented adverb (SpOA). We argue that adverbial confirm developed as a result of contact with the Mandarin adverbial kending, likely due to English–Mandarin bilingualism amongst Chinese Singaporeans, although its use has proliferated throughout the general CSE-speaking population. Quantitatively, adverbial confirm emerges as the most frequently used SpOA when compared to surface-semantically equivalent strongly subjective SpOAs, such as definitely, sure, for sure and surely. The results suggest an increase in preference by CSE speakers to use confirm to express strong speaker certainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a significant gap in research on Singlish by examining The Straits Times (ST) as a language planning and policy tool. Using representation theory, legitimisation theory, and framing, it analyzes ST's media coverage of Singlish across two periods. The article demonstrates how ST has not merely reported on Singlish but has actively engaged in status planning by legitimizing Standard English and delegitimizing Singlish. It argues that while ST does not formulate Singapore's English language policy, it plays a crucial role in shaping public attitudes and containing Singlish. By analyzing ST articles, the article reveals how Singlish was initially portrayed as a 'bogeyman' but later acknowledged for its identity functions, suggesting a shift in how Standard Singapore English and Singlish are perceived in different social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous studies have investigated the productivity of the better construction (in the forms had better, ’d better and better) in British and US English (USE), to present knowledge, no large‐scale comparisons on the use of this construction in other English dialects have been carried out. The present paper aims to address the existing research gap by exploring the synchronic use and grammaticalization rate of better in 20 world Englishes. The analysis of corpus data reveals that better is more grammaticalized in USE than in British English, and even more in Singapore English (SgE) data, where the construction seems to be more grammaticalized than in any other dialect. The hypothesis of a functional need in SgE for deontic better is tested. It is shown why SgE ‘needs’ alternative deontic constructions in a modal system where (semi‐)modals of necessity have been shown to express higher rates of ‘dynamic’ modality than in other dialects. The substrate reinforcement from a parallel construction in Mandarin is presented as a potential driving factor justifying the selection of better as a deontic marker in this particular variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resemblance between languages could be due to relatedness in terms of etymology. Varieties of the same language or dialects resemble one another in many ways because they are related. The languages within a language family, descendants of a common ancestral language, also resemble one another in some ways. To contemplate resemblance between two languages, one could consider their mutual intelligibility or other kinds of formal similarities. For example, while the Chinese languages are not mutually intelligible, they exhibit very similar grammatical patterns. They are all tonal and share a largely common writing system. This paper, however, proposes another way of appreciating language resemblance. It has been observed in the Singapore context that when two different languages, English and Mandarin, are adopted by a community of speakers as dominant languages, over time, the two languages become nativized and resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and the cultural values they embody. The Singaporean bilingual speakers in question are offspring of people from Southern Chinese culture who, as recent as a few generations ago, spoke neither English nor Mandarin as a dominant language. This paper presents evidence to show how Singapore English and Singapore Mandarin, which are mutually unintelligible, may resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and cultural values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report data from the Small World of Singlish Words (SWOSW) Project, where word associations are obtained for a list of common Singlish words. Singapore English, colloquially known as Singlish, is a dialect of English spoken in Singapore. Free association data on these words were collected from a young adult population of university undergraduates using an online survey platform. This data enables the construction of semantic networks, allowing one to examine the semantic structure of individual words in the Singlish lexicon, as well as to compare differences in semantic structure across groups of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spoken in a multilingual environment characterised by continuous contacts with other languages, Singapore English (SgE) is a singular object of study. Its modal system has also been developing in independent ways compared to inner-circle varieties, e.g. British English, its historical ancestor. Different approaches have attempted to explain such developments, including the substratist and the grammaticalisation approaches. The present paper explores both these approaches with the aim of examining the role that they may have in the development of the (semi-)modal verbs of necessity in SgE. Using some corpus analysis conducted on informal data, it will be shown why the substratist approach does not seem sufficient to explain the relatively frequent non-epistemic uses of must in SgE. It will be discussed how SgE must could be instead replicating older dynamic uses, typical of Middle English times (1100–1500 CE), according to a process known as replica grammaticalisation as recapitulation (Ziegeler 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the extent to which age of acquisition (AoA), English language proficiency and use influence consonant perception in Singapore English (SgE). Consonantal pairs of interest were presented in a gating paradigm to determine the amount of linguistic information participants required for accurate consonant identification as a measure of perceptual acuity. Only the [th ]-[θ] and [t]-[θ] phonetic contrasts emerged sensitive to differences in AoA of English, with the early AoA group outperforming the late AoA group. Language proficiency and use did not significantly influence consonant perception. The findings are discussed in light of how AoA may interact with the universal difficulty and distributional regularities of speech contrasts to affect speech processing. Future studies should investigate a wider range of SgE speakers and identify distributional regularities of speech sounds to gain a more comprehensive picture of the factors that influence consonant perception in SgE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singapore's language-in-education policies have always prescribed that only a standard variety of English be allowed in teaching and learning. This view of upholding a standard has been pervasive not only in education but also throughout Singapore's society. In this article, we review Singapore's language policy, emphasizing the functional polarization of languages ideology that serves as its basis, and discuss the resultant natural emergence of the key linguistic marker of Singaporean national identity – Singlish. Charting the journey and growth of Singlish's role and status from both official and socio-cultural perspectives, we highlight that changes can be observed. It is, thus, imperative that Singlish's place in language classrooms and the affordances that Singlish has for language learning be reconsidered. Following a discussion of salient Singlish features, highlighting their appropriacy in social situations where standard English features are not and the fact that many Singapore English features are recognizably shared by both Singlish and Singapore Standard English, we propose a linguistic feature-based contrastive analysis approach for Singapore's English language classrooms. At the core, we call for a review of Singapore's language-in-education policies and the support of various stakeholders in the bid to nurture confident and effective English language users of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous co-existence in Colloquial Singapore English (Singlish) of the past tense alongside already, an aspect marker expressing iamitive functions (Olsson 2013), has not, to present knowledge, received an adequate explanation in terms of diachronic change. The two forms are often seen to overlap in function, but a more intensive survey reveals that only the completive functions overlap, the non-completive functions accounting for the majority of uses in present-day Singapore English. The bias in functions is considered to be the result of a renovation in contact grammaticalization, or a convergence towards the lexifier, often expressed in terms of decreolization in creole languages. The present study considers quantitative data of both completive and non-completive already across four diachronic time periods, concluding that the constant diglossic presence of the standard lexifier since colonization contributed to the convergence shown.

Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors as predictors of particle use. The results suggest a strong gender effect as well as several particle-specific ethnic effects. More generally, our study underlines the special nature of the grammatical class of discourse particles in CSE, which is open to new additions as the sociolinguistic and pragmatic need for them develops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst the variety of /r/ allophones is a labialised variant commonly described as the labiodental approximant [ʋ]. This seems, in recent times, to have become quite a common variant for young British English speech and is 'established as an acceptable feature of mature speech in non-standard accents in the south-east of England'. Deterding and Kwek have also reported the existence of the labiodental approximant [ʋ] in the speech of some young speakers of Singapore English, presenting preliminary impressionistic findings of its existence and attitudes of Singaporeans towards its use. This article further substantiates these previous claims by providing acoustic evidence that the labiodental approximant [ʋ] is indeed present in Singapore English and that it can be differentiated from the more common post-alveolar approximant [ɹ] by comparing the nadir values of their third formants as well as the calculations of third formant rises towards the onset of following vowels. The article also provides further empirical evidence of the phonological environments that condition the realisation of this variant and also of its users. At its core, this article sets the foundations for further phonetic and phonological studies of /r/ variants in Singapore English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of multilingualism, there is still a dearth of research on the language practices of individuals and the social factors that explain their linguistic behaviour, particularly in the Singapore context. This article discusses the dynamics underlying a particular feature of vernacular Singapore speech – language mixing – and how such mixing practices form part of the social identity of the interactions between speakers in their respective social networks. The approach to this current study was adapted from Milroy's research on social networks (Milroy, Lesley. 1989 [1980]. Language and social networks, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.) in order to provide access to subjects' most natural use of languages – that is, their "vernacular" in the Labovian sense. This study investigates various aspects of the multilingual language practices of students in Singapore and reports on the social motivations and the social contexts of language mixing in the personal lives of these speakers in the context of other languages and language varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research on Singapore English (SgE) has shown that there are specific segmental and prosodic patterns that are unique to the three major ethnic groups, Chinese, Malay, and Indian in Singapore. These features have been highlighted as the "stereotypical" ethnic markers of SgE speakers, assuming substrate influence from the speakers' "ethnic" languages (Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil). However, recent research suggests that Singaporeans are becoming increasingly English dominant and has challenged the position of the ethnic languages as true "mother tongues" of Singaporeans. Hence, this study seeks to question if such "stereotypical" ethnic features exist, and if so, the extent to which a less dominant ethnic language would affect the phonology of speakers' English. This study looks specifically at the production of consonants /f/, /θ/, /t/, /v/, and /w/ as salient segmental features in SgE. Participants' phonetic behavior of /θ/, which was produced similarly across the three ethnic groups, disputed substrate influence. Tamil speakers were the most disparate, particularly with the /v/-/w/ contrast production. However, these deviations were often sporadic phonetic changes, which scarcely reflect robust speech patterns in the community. As a result, consonantal production in SgE is found to be largely independent of substrate influence and relatively uniform across the three ethnicities. The homogeneity observed in this study sheds light on bilinguals' acquisition of sounds, and it also provides phonological evidence toward the understanding of the evolutionary process of postcolonial Englishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates young Korean children’s attitudes toward three English varieties: American English (AmE), Singapore English (SiE), and Korean English (KoE). A total of 42 Korean children participated in this study. For data analysis purposes, the results were categorized according to the children’s age and their experience of exposure to formal English learning. In addition to this, 30 Singaporean children were also involved in the study, and their results were compared with the results of the younger group of Korean children. A mixed methodological approach, which included a modified verbal guise technique appropriate for use with children and semi-structured interviews, was also adopted. The results show that 5-year-old Korean and Singaporean children do not prefer one specific variety of English more than the other varieties of English. However, this was not the case for 12-year-old Korean children. These older Korean children preferred AmE and SiE more than KoE, and the “speaker’s pronunciation” was considered to be the critical feature in determining these attitudes. The findings suggest that Korean children’s developing attitudes toward a particular variety of English emerge sometime during their elementary school years.

Lay observers and linguists have claimed that ongoing phonological and lexical changes in Singapore English may be attributed to increased exposure to American English via media consumption (Poedjosoedarmo 2000; Deterding 2007; Leow 2011). Little is known, however, regarding Singaporeans' explicit knowledge of the dialect features of other regions, and how this knowledge is shaped by social and parasocial contact. The present study investigates a well-known difference among regional English dialects: the realization of vowels in the BATH and TRAP lexical sets. 1167 Singaporeans are surveyed regarding their own pronunciation of BATH and TRAP words, as well as their perceptions of how these words are pronounced in California and London. While Singaporeans are found to generally retain a conservative BATH-TRAP distinction, media consumption and travel experience, as well as gender and education level, have significant impacts on reported use. Explicit knowledge of the US BATH-TRAP merger is found to be poor relative to the high US media consumption rate, illustrating the limits of media as a source of sociolinguistic knowledge. Contrasting sharply with the rise of postvocalic rhoticity, reluctance to adopt the BATH-TRAP merger is argued to stem from both functional and ideological factors; conservatism in this feature complicates proposals of a wholesale Americanization of Singapore English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers pronoun omission in different varieties of English. It argues that omitted pronouns simplify structures if their referents are accessible in discourse, which explains the greater frequency of this grammatical feature in high-contact varieties of English, spoken in speech communities with a history of high numbers of second-language users. A corpus study of two high-contact varieties, Indian English and Singapore English, and a low-contact one, British English, is conducted in order to examine the distribution of omitted and overt pronouns. As expected, pronoun omission is more frequent in the high-contact varieties than in British English. Moreover, pronouns are omitted almost exclusively when they have highly accessible referents as antecedents, which is not a conventionalized feature of the grammars of Indian or Singapore English, where overt pronouns are the default choice when referring to antecedents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of the absence of lexicalisation of the O-corner of the Aristotelian Square of Oppositions has challenged the field of pragmatics for many decades, and various explanations have been offered in an attempt to resolve it. The majority of the recent explanations have referred to the operation of Gricean or neo-Gricean scalar implicatures, though few have taken into consideration the significance of reanalysis of adjacent constituents. The present study looks at the interaction between negation and quantifiers in Singapore English, in which the tendency is for (universal) quantifier scope to hold precedence over negative scope, even when the quantifier follows the negation in the clause. A brief spontaneous survey of Singaporean speakers containing a passivization task and comparing a range of universal quantifiers reveals that the syntactic adjacency of the negation and the quantifier is the most likely factor affecting the presence or absence of O-corner lexicalisation in the Aristotelian Square. This is particularly relevant in the case of quantifiers of time, such as always . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Stress in Singapore English determines f0 scaling and possibly alignment in intonation. • Final syllables in phrases are louder, longer and higher pitch. • Individuals differ in the degree to which stress is marked by acoustic means. Previous work on Singapore English prosody has focused largely on establishing the acoustic correlates of lexical stress and examining where the language falls within a rhythm-class typology. Little attention, however, has been paid to how lexical prominence, if present, interacts with phrasal prominence. In this study, we examine the extent to which f0 realizations vary across lexical items with differing stress patterns, while taking into account that prosodic phrasing requirements necessitate an f0 rise to the phrase-final syllable. We show that across target types of varying stress placement, syllable length, and constituency, f0 realizations are highly consistent, involving a rise from the start of the target word or phrase which culminates with a peak on the phrase-final syllable. The location of lexical prominence is the primary influence on the scaling of f0 across the entire target, with stress-initial targets having a higher mean f0. Exploratory analysis of duration and intensity measures further corroborates the prominence-lending nature of the phrase-final syllable, with some evidence for marking of prominence on non-final lexically stressed syllables. The findings support the primarily post-lexical role that f0 plays in marking phrase edges, instead of lexical heads, in Singapore English, in line with a previously proposed AM model of Singapore English intonation. The implications of these findings for the study of prosodic typology and sociolinguistic variation in Singapore English are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to analyse the frequency of use of the progressive aspect in three varieties of Asian Englishes, namely Hong Kong, India and Singapore, considering British English as a point of departure. The use of the progressive will be researched in comparable corpora (International Corpus of English) considering its distribution in the English verbal paradigm and subject person, both in the written and spoken components. Main results indicate that IndE has the highest frequency of the progressive, and Hong Kong English the lowest, when non-native varieties are compared. In all cases, the progressive is more frequent in the spoken than in the written section, and it preferably occurs in the present simple tense. English varieties present significant differences regarding the distribution of the progressive by tense and subject person. Several factors are discussed as possible reasons for such variation.

In British Standard English, number in the verb phrase is exclusively characterized by the use of the -s inflection with the third person singular present tense. World Englishes present a high level of variation as the uninflected third person singular and the inflected third person plural may also occur in these contexts. This paper pursues four objectives: a) to analyse the use of present third person inflections and compare their distribution in different varieties of English; b) to assess the occurrence of forms across speech and writing, text categories and the informant's age and gender; c) to classify the instances by type of subject (nominal vs. pronominal) and d) to evaluate the impact of proximity agreement, notional agreement and the existence of intervening elements in the choice of the inflection. Our evidence comes from the New Zealand, Indian, Singaporean and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]