Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors as predictors of particle use. The results suggest a strong gender effect as well as several particle-specific ethnic effects. More generally, our study underlines the special nature of the grammatical class of discourse particles in CSE, which is open to new additions as the sociolinguistic and pragmatic need for them develops.

This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. The paper explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE. It also documents the process of compiling and organizing CoSEM and describes the corpus's initial structure and composition. We further discuss the social variables used in tagging the data, as well as ethical challenges, advantages, and disadvantages unique to online message datasets. In addition, we present preliminary analyses of two selected CSE features: (1) the Hokkien‐derived expression (bo)jio and (2) sentence‐final adverbs (already, also, only). As CoSEM is an ongoing project, we conclude the article with notes on future directions.

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Control systems prototyping is usually constrained by model complexity, embedded system configurations, and interface testing. The proposed control system prototyping of a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) with a docking hoop (DH) to recover an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named AUVDH using a combination of software tools allows the prototyping process to be unified. This process provides systematic design from mechanical, hydrodynamics, dynamics modelling, control system design, and simulation to testing in water. As shown in a three-dimensional simulation of an AUVDH model using MATLAB™/Simulink™ during the launch and recovery process, the control simulation of a sliding mode controller is able to control the positions and velocities under the external wave, current, and tether forces. In the water test using the proposed Python-based GUI platform, it shows that the AUVDH is capable to perform station-keeping under the external disturbances. OPEN ACCESSRobotics 2015, 4 493

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of world Englishes (e.g., Greenbaum, 1988; Richards & Tay, 1977). Linguistically, the grammar and lexicon of CSE are systematically imported from other non-English languages used in the island nation (Leimgruber, 2011). From a creolist perspective, it can be viewed as an English-lexifier creole that contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as Malay, Tamil and other varieties in the Singapore language ecology (McWhorter, 2007; Platt, 1975). Several distinct features across various levels of language have been investigated in CSE, including phonetics (Starr & Balasubramaniam, 2019), morphosyntax (Bao, 2010; Bao & Wee, 1999), semantics (Hiramoto & Sato, 2012), and pragmatics (Hiramoto, 2012; Leimgruber, 2016; Lim, 2007).