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

Charts the history of Singapore English and explores the linguistic, historical and social factors that have influenced its variety.

Zhiming Bao (Author)

9781107022089, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 August 2015

232 pages, 33 tables
23.6 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

'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, Universität Regensburg, Germany

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.

1. Introduction
2. The ecology of Singapore English
3. Grammatical system and substratum transfer
4. Topic prominence, empty categories and the bare conditional
5. Substratum, lexifier and typological universals
6. Frequency, usage and the circumscriptive role of the lexifier
7. Convergence-to-substratum
8. Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF], Sociolinguistics [CFB]