Singapore English: Mô tả ngữ pháp biến thể ngôn ngữ - Lisa Lim

Singapore English: A grammatical description Varieties of English Around the World General Editor Edgar W. Schneider Department of English & American Studies University of Regensburg Universitätsstraße 31 D-93053 REGENSBURG Germany edgar.de Editorial Assistants Alexander Kautzsch, Magnus Huber (Regensburg) Editorial Board Laurie Bauer (Wellington); Manfred Görlach (Cologne); Rajend Mesthrie (Cape Town); Peter Trudgill (Fribourg); Walt Wolfram (Raleigh, NC) General Series Volume G33 Singapore English: A grammatical description Edited by Lisa Lim Singapore English A grammatical description Edited by Lisa Lim University of Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39. Cover picture: The sculpture ‘The River Merchants’ (sculptor: Aw Tee Hong) is located at the mouth of the Singapore River, and portrays Alexander Laurie Johnston, Scotsman and prominent merchant, interacting with a Chinese trader and Malay chief. It is in encounters of this type where different languages meet that innovative linguistic features – such as those found in Singapore English – arise.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singapore English : a grammatical description / edited by Lisa Lim. (Varieties of English Around the World, issn 0172–7362 ; v. g33) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. English language--Singapore--Grammar.

English language--Variation- -Singapore. English language--Dialects--Singapore.95957-dc22 2004057688 isbn 90 272 4893 1 (Eur. paper) © 2004 – John Benjamins B. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

John Benjamins Publishing Co. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Table of contents Acknowledgements XI Tables & Figures XIII Chapter  English in Singapore and Singapore English  Background and methodology  . English arrives in Singapore 2 .2 English in education 3 .3 And English in the home and streets 5 .3 A brief history of Singapore English scholarship 7 .4 The Grammar of Spoken Singapore English Corpus (GSSEC) 0 . Collecting the data  .2 Who are the Singapore English speakers?  .3 The resulting corpus 2 .5 Outline of volume 4 .6 Concluding remarks 6 Chapter 2 Sounding Singaporean 9 2.2 Monophthong realisation and distribution 20 2.3 Diphthongs, and triphthongs? 23 2.5 Vowel substrate influence? 25 2.2 Voiced obstruents 29 vi Table of contents 2.5 Liquids and glides 3 2.2 r, taps and flaps 3 2.6 Syllable structure processes 32 2.2 Final consonant deletion or replacement 32 2.3 Consonant cluster reduction 33 2.8 Consonantal substrate influences? 34 2. Intonation forms and functions 39 2.2 Characteristic CSE forms 42 2. Sustained level steps 42 2.2 Phrase-final lengthening 43 2.4 Pitch patterns and particles from the substrates? 47 2.3 Focus and prominence 49 2.5 Conclusions 53 Chapter 3 Nouns and noun phrases 57 3.2 Nouns and definiteness 58 3. Indefinite articles 58 3.2 Definite articles 60 3.3 Premodifiers as heads 62 Table of contents vii 3.3 Number and agreement 63 3.4 Different ‘ones’ 66 3. Reifier one? 68 3.3 More on ‘singulative’ 70 3.6 Heavy NP shift 72 3.7 Conclusions 73 Chapter 4 The verbal cluster 75 4. Optionality of verbal inflections 77 4.2 Verb forms and their uses 79 4.3 The copula be and other predicate phrases 82 4.4 Be as an auxiliary 85 4. The progressive auxiliary be 85 4.2 The passive auxiliary be 86 4.3 Be as part of be supposed to 87 4.5 Factors determining the (co-)occurrence of auxiliaries 87 4.2 Subject NPs, negation, and the auxiliary 88 4.3 Wh-interrogatives and subject-auxiliary inversion 9 4.6 Verb reduplication and aspectual classes of events 92 4.2 Tests for aspectual classes in CSE 93 4.3 Constraints on verb reduplication 95 4. Four types of passive constructions 97 4.2 The kena passive 98 4.8 Conclusion 99 viii Table of contents Chapter 5 Reduplication and discourse particles 05 5.3 The possibility of substratal influence 3 5. Other cases of substratal influence 3 5.2 Substratal influence in the case of CSE reduplication 4 5.5 A brief summary of the particles 25 5.6 Conclusion 26 Chapter 6 The evolution of Singapore English: Finding the matrix 27 6.2 Problems of classification 29 6.3 Sources of hybridity in SE 3 6. The lexifier 32 6.2 Substrates and adstrates 32 6.2 Copula & property verbs 35 6.5 Nouns and polyfunctionality 39 6.3 Final remarks 40 Table of contents ix 6.4 Origins of English in Singapore 4 6.5 Conclusions 45 References 5 Name index 65 Subject index 67 Acknowledgements My first expression of appreciation is for Umberto Ansaldo, who one day got me to see that I could put this volume together, and who all days got me to keep at it and to believe it would be worth it.

I also owe my thanks to Joe Foley for having invited me to be Co-P. on the project whose data formed the basis of this book; and the other members of the research project team and authors of chapters in this volume for being integral and interested parties in both en- deavours, and for enduring the numerous delays both have encountered, always with good cheer: I hope it’s been worth it. I am especially beholden to Lionel Wee and Umberto Ansaldo for their extra little contribution, stepping in when things seemed at a stand-still. I am grateful to Salikoko Mufwene for his enthusiasm over the volume and his thoughts and feedback on earlier drafts of some chapters; and to Edgar Schneider for his critical eye and constructive comments on later drafts of the manuscript: I am glad that he felt this a volume that would make a valuable contribution to the Varieties of English Around the World series, and trust that it does not disappoint.

I am also thankful for the incredible patience and good humour that Kees Vaes at John Benjamins must certainly possess, and his for- tunately-not-misplaced faith that the manuscript would ultimately come in. The descriptions in this volume would not be without the data. I acknowl- edge the support provided by the National University of Singapore’s Academic Research Grant R-103-000-003-112 which funded the research project Towards a Reference Grammar of Singapore English in which the Grammar of Spoken Singapore English Corpus (GSSEC) database was collected. Our students at the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore, too numerous to mention by name, also played no small part in this.

For toiling over the orthographic and phonetic transcriptions, we are obliged to the Honours and postgraduate students. I am particularly indebted to Diane Chang who, amongst many other tasks, digitised the data and checked and standardised the transcripts, and whose technological know-how with recordings and webpages has been invaluable. Finally, where would we be if not for our native Singapore English speakers and their friends and family who put up with having their otherwise private lives recorded, and who provided xii Acknowledgements conversations which not only comprise a precious resource but which are, above all, animated, amusing, and utterly Singaporean. LL Amsterdam & Singapore; June 2004 Tables & Figures Table 2.

Standard Lexical Sets for SSBE, GA, SSE and CSE. Monophthongs of CSE. Monophthongs of Hokkien. Monophthongs of Cantonese.

Monophthongs of (Singapore) Mandarin. Monophthongs of Malay. Monophthongs of Tamil. CSE (merged) phonemes matched with vowels of local languages.

Consonants of CSE. Consonants of Hokkien. Consonants of Cantonese. Consonants of (Singapore) Mandarin.

Consonants of Malay. Consonants of Tamil. A summary of the INTSINT symbols, adapted for SE. Reduplication in CSE.

Reduplication in Malay. Reduplication in Mandarin Chinese. Similarities in reduplication functions in CSE, Malay and Chinese. Reduplication patterns and functions in SE and the substrates.

Gradual fall: third year. Rise-fall: yes. Level tune: you told me. Fall-level: (I think) happier.

44 Chapter  English in Singapore and Singapore English Background and methodology Lisa Lim† and Joseph A. Foley‡ †University of Amsterdam ‡Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation (Regional Language Centre), Singapore . Preamble There are not many these days who are not acquainted with Singapore English (SE) – often fondly referred to as Singlish:1 much scholarly research has been published on it; it figures in current surveys of varieties of English as well as in textbooks; it has a listing in dictionaries, and even has dedicated websites. What is the need then for yet another volume on Singapore English? This volume is particular because its description of structural features of Singapore English is based on a large corpus of naturally-occurring spontane- ous speech of young, native speakers of Singapore English, and hence what the reader will find in this volume is a description of a vibrant, current, contempo- rary, colloquial Singapore English, spoken by the Singapore English speaker of today, that is, those young Singaporeans who grew up during a period where, for all their school-going years, they have had to be what has been referred to as “English-knowing bilinguals” (Pakir 1992), that is, they have had to be profi- cient in English and their ‘mother tongue’ (these notions to be expounded upon in Section 1. This volume will describe not just the features which distin- guish SE from other varieties of English and, indeed, which characterise it as SE, but will also highlight the many aspects that it does share with other varieties.

Singapore English has, since first written about three decades ago (Tongue 1974), morphed into quite a different animal, and it still continues to change. This is in no small way because of the speed at which language policies are implemented, and the speed at which the country and its community has devel- oped. The next section will provide a historical and sociolinguistic background to place the variety in perspective. 2 Lisa Lim and Joseph A. English arrives in Singapore In a small island of 4 million people made up of 76.4% persons of other races (Leow 2001), it may seem strange that English, the language of the colonial rulers, should have the dominance and scope that it commands in the day-to-day life of Singaporeans.

The situation is partly the legacy of colonial history and partly the effect of post-independence policies in which English has been recognised as a resource to increase the country’s rate of economic and social development. 1819 tends to be recognised as marking the first significant event,2 when Sir Stamford Raffles acquired the island for the British East India Company. Singapore consequently became part of the Straits Settlements, which at that time consisted of Penang and Malacca. Singapore’s location at the crossroads of the trade routes in Southeast Asia and China made it an effective counter to Dutch trading operations in Indonesia, and in less than a year, more than five thousand people had settled on the island, including, in addition to those that came with the colonial power, migrants from the neighbouring countries.

The most important groups were the Malays from Malaya, the Javanese, Balinese, Bataks and Buginese from Indonesia, the Tamils, Malayalees, Punjabis, Sikhs and other ethnic groups from India, and the Hokkiens, Cantonese, Teochews, Hakkas, Hainanese and Chinese from other dialect groups from China; other minorities included Arabs and Filipinos. It should be noted that, even prior to this influx of settlers, the British administration already found on arrival a heterogeneous population of local Malays and Indonesians, Southern Chinese and Indian traders, and some mixed ethnic groups such as the Peranakans and possibly Eurasians. Also al- ready in place was a capitan (‘captain’) system, which divided the society into three groups: the Malays, Chinese, and Indians, plus a capitan-less group of ‘others’, and each ethnic community had in effect its own legal system under the jurisdiction of its own capitan (Bloom 1986: 352). The British found it to their advantage to preserve this ethnically-based division, and to this day, it constitutes the cultural logic of Singapore’s “multiracialism” (Benjamin 1976) that underpins its current language policy (see Section 1.