David Deterding
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625444
- eISBN:
- 9780748651535
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625444.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, English Language
Over the past few decades, Singapore English has been emerging as an independent variety of English with its own distinct style of pronunciation, grammar and word usage. This book provides an ...
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Over the past few decades, Singapore English has been emerging as an independent variety of English with its own distinct style of pronunciation, grammar and word usage. This book provides an overview of this variety, including coverage of its pronunciation, including comparisons with the pronunciation of English in other countries in South-East Asia; its morphology and grammar; the words that are used, including instances where the meaning is distinct from other varieties of English; the discourse patterns that are found, including use of particles such as lah; and its history and current developments. All the findings presented in the book are illustrated with extensive examples from one hour of recorded conversational data from the Lim Siew Hwee Corpus of Informal Singapore Speech, as well as some extracts from the NIE Corpus of Spoken Singapore Speech and recent blogs. In addition, usage patterns found in the data are summarised, to provide a foundation for the reported occurrence of various features of the language. A full transcript of the data is included in the final chapter of the book.Less
Over the past few decades, Singapore English has been emerging as an independent variety of English with its own distinct style of pronunciation, grammar and word usage. This book provides an overview of this variety, including coverage of its pronunciation, including comparisons with the pronunciation of English in other countries in South-East Asia; its morphology and grammar; the words that are used, including instances where the meaning is distinct from other varieties of English; the discourse patterns that are found, including use of particles such as lah; and its history and current developments. All the findings presented in the book are illustrated with extensive examples from one hour of recorded conversational data from the Lim Siew Hwee Corpus of Informal Singapore Speech, as well as some extracts from the NIE Corpus of Spoken Singapore Speech and recent blogs. In addition, usage patterns found in the data are summarised, to provide a foundation for the reported occurrence of various features of the language. A full transcript of the data is included in the final chapter of the book.
Mira Ariel
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198709848
- eISBN:
- 9780191780158
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198709848.003.0020
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Semantics and Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics / Neurolinguistics / Cognitive Linguistics
Codes and inferences compete in language, and the competition manifests itself at the level of the language system and in real‐time interactions. Grammars sometimes offer a monosemous code for some ...
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Codes and inferences compete in language, and the competition manifests itself at the level of the language system and in real‐time interactions. Grammars sometimes offer a monosemous code for some messages, but sometimes a form not coded for the intended message can (or must) be mobilized to serve the speaker's message. This is polysemy, where the speaker relies on a rich context which helps the addressee derive the interpretation via inference. This chapter examines various disjunctive interpretations and finds a number of competitions for expressing them. First, the disjunctive idea may be expressed by a dedicated construction, e.g. [X or Y], but it may be left to inference, when derived on a series of questions, for example. Second, specialized disjunctive interpretations may be conveyed by the general, polysemous construction, with the help of context‐driven inferences, or by dedicated, monosemous sub‐constructions, which encode the specialized meaning (e.g. [X or something]).Less
Codes and inferences compete in language, and the competition manifests itself at the level of the language system and in real‐time interactions. Grammars sometimes offer a monosemous code for some messages, but sometimes a form not coded for the intended message can (or must) be mobilized to serve the speaker's message. This is polysemy, where the speaker relies on a rich context which helps the addressee derive the interpretation via inference. This chapter examines various disjunctive interpretations and finds a number of competitions for expressing them. First, the disjunctive idea may be expressed by a dedicated construction, e.g. [X or Y], but it may be left to inference, when derived on a series of questions, for example. Second, specialized disjunctive interpretations may be conveyed by the general, polysemous construction, with the help of context‐driven inferences, or by dedicated, monosemous sub‐constructions, which encode the specialized meaning (e.g. [X or something]).
