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The aspectual system of Singapore English and the systemic substratist explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2005

BAO ZHIMING
BAO ZHIMING
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore
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Abstract

Singapore English is a contact language with a constant linguistic substratum and superstratum. It lends itself to an interesting case study on how linguistic neologisms emerge out of a pool of competing features from the typologically distinct languages active in the contact ecology. This paper investigates the aspectual system of Singapore English and that of Chinese, the main substrate language, and of English, the lexical-source language. Despite the presence of competing aspectual categories from the two languages, the aspectual system of Singapore English is essentially the Chinese system filtered through the morphosyntax of English. Substrate influence is systemic, and the competing grammatical subsystems do not mix.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , July 2005 , pp. 237 - 267
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the SPCL conference organized by the University of Coimbra, Portugal, at Tsinghua University, Taiwan, and at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. I thank Umberto Ansaldo, William Croft, Viviane Deprez, Claire Lefebvre, Yaron Matras, Steve Matthews, Dylan Tsai, Virginia Yip, Debra Ziegeler, and three anonymous JL referees for their comments. All errors of fact and interpretation are my own. The work is partially supported by National University of Singapore faculty research grants R103-000-015-112 and R103-000-035-112. I have also benefited from a visit in 2004 to the Centre of Chinese Linguistics, Beijing University. I would like to thank Lu Jianming, the director of the Centre, for his generous support.