The Making of Vernacular Singapore English
System, Transfer, and Filter
Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact Series

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.

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