The term "Singlish" figures prominently in local discussions of English in Singapore. But because the term has been used by different people to mean different things, this has resulted in (undetected) confusion, leading to discussions where not much progress is being made. In this paper, we first attempt to tear apart the various meanings of "Singlish". We then discuss how these different uses of "Singlish", and, by implication, its contrast with Standard English, also embody a number of assumptions about the nature of language, culture, and society, and how some of these assumptions turn out to be fallacious. In many ways, the "Singlish" issue mirrors similar recent language debates in the UK and USA. Our discussion highlights the academic as well as advocacy work that linguists must continue to engage in, to bring about a more (socio)linguistically sophisticated public, and to find ways to make public discussion about English in Singapore better-informed.
This paper explores a theory of the meaning-form relation based on ranked and violable constraints [A. Prince, P. Smolensky, 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and University of Colorado, Boulder], using the English genitive construction as a testing ground. Our main thesis is that partially ordered optimality-theoretic grammars allow us to relate four apparently independent empirical phenomena: (i) categorical grammaticality contrasts; (ii) variation and preferences in expression; (iii) ambiguity and preferences in interpretation; (iv) lexical organization. #
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