At the edge of contact: insights into universality from Singlish
Si Kai Lee
December 2023
 

A characteristic feature of Singlish, a contact variety spoken in Singapore, is the apparent optionality of inflectional morphology, which has been analysed in the literature as involving phonological free variation. I present novel evidence to demonstrate that the absence of inflectional morphology correlates to syntactic and semantic reflexes that are not predicted if the alternation holds at the level of phonology. I demonstrate that each of these reflexes, such as the bleeding of inverse scope and certain locality effects, has been independently noted to hold of topicalisation and focalisation constructions in English, and propose a structural analysis of clauses lacking overt inflectional morphology in Singlish, where the ostensible subjects of such clauses are realised in a (low) left peripheral position which exhibits mixed A and A' properties. I then demonstrate that these clauses are also (i) temporally ambiguous, and (ii) sensitive to an eventive/stative asymmetry, with eventive predicates being disallowed in bare inflection-less clauses. I argue that these facts are congruent with an account in which tense is not syntactically projected, and discuss the implications of such an account for the Extended Projection Principle (EPP), namely that the locus of the EPP must be contextually determined (Bošković 2023), and cannot be universally satisfied in TP. I also show that the relative ordering of elements within the Singlish nominal is rigid, patterning like English, and unlike Chinese, which exhibits a much higher degree of word order freedom within the nominal domain, and that Singlish has inherited the article system of English. I argue that this provides independent evidence for the NP/DP hypothesis, which attributes properties such as the freedom of word order within the nominal phrase to the presence/absence of DP, and that the contrast between Singlish and Chinese is counterevidence against the universal projection of DP. I also present novel data pertaining to two Singlish prenominal relativisation strategies, and argue that they result from the Chinese-inherited structure of Singlish interacting with English-inherited lexicon. In sum, I show that the data presented characterises Singlish as a language variety that is quite transparent in its syntax-morphology mapping.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008528
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: University of Connecticut
keywords: singlish, left periphery, language universals, contact, syntax-semantics interface, nominal structure, clausal structure, tense, agreement, anti-agreement, topicalisation, topichood, subjecthood, epp, np/dp language distinction, eventivity, stativity, event structure, syntax, semantics, language policy, language change, syntax
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