Morphosyntactic Choice in Singapore English

Grant Call: 2024 Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship Call

Project Status: Ongoing

The project seeks to examine how Singapore English (SgE) speakers make choices in their language use. More specifically, it aims to better understand the choices speakers have between competing morphosyntactic variants that are otherwise equivalent in meaning by asking the following question: What linguistic conditions license and/or favour one variant over the others? To do so, the project combines formal behavioural experiments with the creation and analysis of SgE treebanks or corporate enriched with morphosyntactic annotations.

Through his project, Asst Prof Huang hopes to achieve the following objectives:

• Evaluate existing theories in syntax and psycholinguistics by examining how Singapore English speakers make choices in their language use.

• Refine existing descriptions of SgE and adstrate languages (e.g., Chinese varieties, Malay, British or American English) through experiments and corpus analyses.

• Understand the relative historical contribution of adstrate languages in shaping SgE.

• Clarify the division of labour between sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and even grammatical constraints in SgE speaker choices to obtain a more nuanced view of morphosyntactic variation within SgE.

Findings from the project can help advance our understanding of SgE and contribute towards closing a major SgE language resource gap through the creation of an online Singapore Language Resource Repository. These efforts could in turn support the development of language-related applications – including chatbots, large language models, speech-to-text/text-to-speech technologies – that are sensitive to Singapore linguistics and cultural norms.