The Making of Vernacular Singapore English: System, Transfer, and Filter

Description

Singapore 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.

Zhiming Bao is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore.

'Bao offers a nuanced and novel take on the role of Chinese grammar in the formation of Singapore English. He clearly shows that this continuously evolving language holds important lessons for our understanding of language creation and New English varieties.' Umberto Ansaldo, University of Hong Kong 'Superstrate filter guides selection from systemic substrate transfer in emergent 'Singlish': Bao's brilliant, theoretically ambitious analysis represents cutting-edge thinking uniting contact theory, usage-based linguistics, exemplar theory, typology, and construction grammar.' Edgar W. Schneider, Universitat Regensburg, Germany