An in depth study of discourse particles in singapore english

AN IN-DEPTH STUDY OF DISCOURSE PARTICLES IN SINGAPORE ENGLISH VIVIEN LER SOON LAY (B.A. Hons.) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2005 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Grateful thanks to Jesus, my Lord and Saviour. My heartfelt thanks to Anthony, my husband, for his love, understanding and support. A big thank-you goes to my supervisors, Dr Lionel Wee and Dr Ni Yibin, for guidance and encouragement, and for helping me to bring this work to its present form. I am grateful to the thesis committee, Dr Ni Yibin, Dr Lionel Wee and Dr Benny Lee for insightful comments, penetrating questions, and feedback. For helping me with pragmatics, I specially thank Dr Peter Tan and Dr Benny Lee. For introducing and helping me with relevance theory, I thank Dr Ni Yibin. Special thanks to Dr Desmond Allison who read some of the chapters and made invaluable comments, which I have gratefully incorporated in the thesis. Thanks also to Dr Leong Liew Geok, Dr Vivienne Fong and Dr Anneliese Kramer-Dahl for their patient encouragement and support. For helping me to the last minute in preparing this work for submission, I am most obliged to Chiam Tow Yi and Shane Ghui. I have also learnt a lot from my peers. I am grateful to them for their help in various ways in the writing of this thesis, for their generosity of mind and spirit: Christine Pelly · Tow Yi · Roman Kotov · He Jisheng · Christina Low · Marcus Tan · Gabrielle Wee · Park Hyun-Ju · Liang Tong · Diane Chang · Beatriz Lorente · Ben Choi ii For helpful discussions and insights, I thank Dr Anthea Gupta · Kerstin Fischer · Tim Wharton · Dr Edgar Schneider · Dr Irene Wong · Dr Tony Hung · the late Dr Ruth Brend My friends, Alvin Leong · Timothy Sim · Suzanne Quay · Lee Gek Ling · Maliga Jeganathan · Gek Cheng · Sam Peri · Shu Hoong · Michelle Oh · Matilda Gabrielpillai · Susan Lim · May Ho · Noreen Nichols · Carmela · Nancy Zehnder · Siew Teng · Mark Chan · John Ng · Michael Tan · Peter Chao · Mayumi Nishikawa · Stefan Gries Small group and church members, especially Wayne Teo · Soke Fung · David Khoo · David Lim · Timothy Wiarda Line dancers, volunteer helpers and friends from NUS and NIE. My two lovely, helpful and caring children, Shane and Amos Ghui. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not overflow you. Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. - Isaiah 43:2; 40:31 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements Table of Contents List of Tables and Figures Abbreviations Summary ii iv x xi xii Chapter 1: General Overview 1.1 1.2 Introduction 1.1.1 Definition of discourse particles 1.1.2 Meaning Background 12 1.2.1 Singapore English and discourse particles 12 1.2.2 Discourse particles and communication 18 1.3 Sources of data 20 1.4 Aims and scope of the current study 23 1.4.1 Basic assumption 23 1.4.2 The purpose of the study 23 1.4.3 Methodological issues 25 1.5 Significance of the study 27 1.6 Structure of the thesis 30 iv Page Chapter 2: Singapore English and previous studies 2.1 Introduction 31 2.2 Singapore English: origins and development 32 2.3 Features of Singapore English 35 2.3.1 Discourse particles 35 2.3.1.1 Frequency 36 2.3.1.2 Syntactic distribution 36 2.3.1.3 Tone 39 2.3.2 Morphological features of SCE 41 2.3.3 Syntactic features 42 2.3.4 Other features of SCE 43 2.4 Previous studies: main trends 45 2.5 Multifunctionality of SCE discourse particles 47 2.5.1 Meh 47 2.5.2 Hor 50 2.5.3 Lah 54 2.5.4 Leh 69 2.5.5 Lor 71 2.5.6 Ma 73 2.5.7 What 75 2.5.8 Ah and hah 83 2.6 Summary 85 v Page Chapter 3: Relevance theory and discourse particles 3.1 3.2 3.3 Introduction 87 3.1.1 Cognitive activity and relevance 90 3.1.2 Relevance and ostensive communication 92 3.1.3 The principles of relevance 94 3.1.4 Cognitive effect and processing effort 99 Discourse particles and utterance interpretation 105 3.2.1 Utterance interpretation 105 3.2.2 Semantics and pragmatics 111 3.2.3 Inference and context 111 Verbal communication 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.4 116 Cognitive environment, manifestness, explicatures and implicatures 118 Higher-level explicatures 126 Discourse particles and non-truth-conditional meaning 130 3.4.1 Conceptual and procedural meaning 132 3.4.2 Constraints on relevance 137 3.5 Discourse particles and intonation 140 3.6 Procedural meaning: a re-visit 142 3.6.1 Speaker-orientation and hearer-orientation 144 3.6.2 Discourse particles and discourse connectives 146 3.7 Describing the meaning of the particles 150 3.8 Summary 152 vi Page Chapter 4: The meh particle 4.1 Introduction 153 4.2 Previous accounts 156 4.3 Meh: from varieties of Mandarin into SCE? 162 4.4 Formal features 164 4.5 Meaning of meh 171 4.5.1 Reducer of effort 171 4.5.2 Speaker-orientation 186 4.5.3 Ill-formed meh-constructions 190 4.6 Conceptual or procedural? 196 4.7 Truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional? 204 4.8 Explicit or implicit? 206 4.9 Meh and the why construction 207 4.10 Summary 210 Chapter 5: Hor: response-eliciting particle 5.1 Introduction 212 5.2 Previous accounts 215 5.3 Hor: from Hokkien and Cantonese into SCE? 219 5.4 Description and distribution 221 5.5 Meaning of hor 225 5.5.1 Unified meaning of hor 226 5.5.1.1 Hor in imperatives 230 vii Page 5.5.2 5.5.1.2 Utterance-medial hor 232 5.5.1.3 Syntactically independent hor 237 5.5.1.4 Hor in non-restricted clauses 239 Hearer-orientation 241 5.6 Hor and procedural meaning 245 5.7 Truth-conditionality of hor 254 5.8 Hor and ill-formed constructions 256 5.9 Hor and meh 260 5.10 Summary 264 Chapter 6: The lah particle in SCE 6.1 Introduction 265 6.2 Functions of lah: previous accounts 268 6.3 Source of lah in SCE 278 6.4 Distribution and description 283 6.5 Unified meaning of lah 285 6.5.1 Lah and declaratives 288 6.5.2 Lah and imperatives 291 6.5.3 Lah and wh-interrogatives 292 6.5.4 Lah and pragmatic functions 294 6.5.4.1 Lah and obviousness 295 6.5.4.2 Lah and friendliness 297 6.5.4.3 Lah and impatience 298 viii 6.5.4.4 Lah and emphasis 298 6.5.5 Lah and speaker/hearer orientation 299 6.5.6 Lah and truth-conditionality 301 6.6 Co-occurrences of lah with discourse markers 302 6.7 Ill-formed lah-constructions 313 6.8 Summary 318 Chapter 7: Discussion and conclusion 7.1 Introduction 319 7.2 Findings and contributions 321 7.2.1 Encoded meaning of the particles: unified account 322 7.2.2 Discourse particles in SCE 327 7.3 Suggestions for further research 330 333 Bibliography Appendix A The design of an ICE corpus 350 Appendix B Survey 351 Appendix C Results of the survey 354 ix LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Page Chapter Table 2.1 A comparison of SCE discourse particles in the spoken categories in ICE-SIN 36 Syntactic distribution of discourse particles in Singapore Colloquial English 38 Comparison of functions of lah 62 Types of communicated information by utterance (modified from Wilson and Sperber 1993:3) 129 The role that discourse particles play in communication facilitating processes of pragmatic inferences 140 Results of acceptability survey 166 A comparison of hor and meh 263 A comparison of the top five SCE particles in the spoken categories in ICE-SIN 266 A section of the concordance listing of lah in ICE-SIN (spoken) 304 Table 6.3 Common co-occurrences of lah and other discourse markers 305 Table 6.4 Common o-occurrences of expressions to the left of lah 311 Table 7.1 Syntactic distribution of discourse particles in SCE 329 Table 7.2 A comparison of three SCE particles: meh, hor and lah. 330 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Chapter Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Chapter Table 4.1 Chapter Table 5.1 Chapter Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Chapter x Infantidou, Elly. 2000. Procedural encoding of explicatures by the Modern Greek particle taha. In Andersen, Gisle and Thorstein Fretheim (eds.). Pragmatic markers and propositional attitude, 119-144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Infantidou, Elly. 2001. Evidentials and relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Itani, Reiko. 1993. The Japanese sentence-final particle ka: a relevance-theoretic approach. Lingua 90: 129-147. Itani, Reiko. 1998. A relevance-based analysis of hearsay particles: with special reference to Japanese sentence-final particle tte. In Carston, Robyn and Seiji Uchida (eds). 1998. Relevance theory: applications and implications, 47-68. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 1993. The discourse marker well: a relevance-theoretical account. Journal of pragmatics 19: 435-452. Jucker, Andreas H. and Sara W. Smith. 1996. Explicit and implicit ways of enhancing common ground in conversations Pragmatics 6:1-18. Jucker, Andreas H. and Sara W. Smith. 1998. And people just you know like ‘wow’: discourse markers as negotiating strategies. In Jucker, A. H. and Yael Ziv (eds.). Discourse particles: descriptions and theory, 171-202. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv (eds.) 1998. Discourse particles: descriptions and theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kanigel Robert. 1998. Bancroft Press. Vintage reading: from Plato to Bradbury. Baltimore: Kao L. 1957. The comprehensive book on Hokkien dialect. Singapore: Marican & sons. Kuo, Eddie ChenYu. 1976. The Status of English in Singapore: a sociolinguistic analysis. In William Crewe (ed.), The English Language in Singapore, 10-33. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press. Kwan-Terry, Anna. 1978. The meaning and source of the la and what particles in Singapore English. RELC Journal 9(2): 22-36. Kwan-Terry, Anna. 1991. Through the looking glass: A child’s use of particles in Chinese and English and its implications on language transfer, in Kwan-Terry, Anna (ed.) Child language development in Singapore and Malaysia, 161-183. Singapore: University Press. Kwan-Terry, Anna. 1992. Towards a dictionary of Singapore English – issues relating to making entries for particles in Singapore English. In Pakir, Anne (ed.), Proceedings of the lexicography workshop: Words in a cultural context, 62-72. Singapore: Singapore University Press. 340 Kwok, Helen. 1984. Sentence particles in Cantonese. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian studies. Lakoff, George and Rafael E. Núñez. 2000. Where mathematics comes from: how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being. New York: Basic Books. Lappin Shalom (ed.). 1996. The handbook of contemporary semantic theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Lee, Gek Ling. 1994. Is Singlish becoming a language of prestige? In da Cunha, Derek (ed.), Debating Singapore: reflective essays, 81-81. Singapore Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Lee-Wong, Song Mei. 2001. The polemics of Singlish. English Today 65, 17:1, 3945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lenk, Uta. 1998. Marking discourse coherence: functions of discourse markers in spoken English. Tuebingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Ler, Soon Lay. 2001a. The discourse particle meh in Singapore English. Paper presented at the Department of English Language and Literature Seminar Series, National University of Singapore, 16 April 2001. Ler, Soon Lay. 2001b. The discourse particle meh in Singapore English: in service of efficient communication. Paper presented to the Culture, Communication & Language Pedagogy International Conference, 29-31 May 2001. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Baptist University. Ler, Soon Lay. 2001c. The interpretation of the discourse particle meh in Singapore Colloquial English. Asian Englishes: an international journal of the sociolinguistics of English in Asia/Pacific. Vol. 4, No. 2, 4-23. Japan: ALC Press. Ler, Soon Lay. 2001d. The discourse particle lah in Singapore English: a cognitive approach. Paper presented at The twenty-eighth LACUS Forum July 31 – August 4, 2001, Université du Québec Montréal (UQÀM), Montréal, Canada. Awarded a commendation in the competition for The Presidents’ pre-doctoral prize for 2001. Ler, Soon Lay. 2001e. The discourse particle 'meh' in Singapore English: in service of efficient communication. In Littlewood, William, Oliver Chan and Derrick Stone (eds.). HKBU Papers in Applied Language Studies, Vol. 6. Dec 2001, 35-52. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Baptist University Ler, Soon Lay. 2002a. The lah particle in Singapore English: a relevance-theoretic approach. In Brend, Ruth, William Sullivan and Arle Lommel (eds.), LACUS Forum XXVIII, 287-296. Houston, Texas: Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States. Ler, Soon Lay. 2002b. The interpretation of the hor particle in Singapore English. Paper presented at the International Association of Applied Linguistics 13th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA 2002) 16-21 December 2002. Singapore. 341 Ler, Soon Lay. forthcoming. A relevance-theoretic approach to discourse particles in Singapore English. In Fischer, Kerstin (ed.) Approaches to discourse particles. Levinson Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings. Cambridge; Masschusetts: The MIT Press. Li, Charles N and Sandra A. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: a functional reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Light, Timothy. 1982. On ‘deing’. Computational analyses of Asian and African languaes (CAAAL) 19:21-49. Lim, Catherine. 1986. English in Singapore: a study of its status and its solidarity and the attitudes to its use. Ph.D. thesis (AppLing). Singapore: National University of Singapore. Lim, Lisa (ed.). 2004. Singapore English: Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. a grammatical description. Locke, John. 1959. An essay concerning human understanding. Fraser, Alexander C. (ed.). Vol 1. New York: Dover [1691]. Loke, Kit-Ken & Low, Johna Mei-Yin. 1988. A proposed descriptive framework for the pragmatic meanings of the particle ‘la’ in colloquial Singaporean English. In Brian McCarthy (ed). Asian-Pacific papers: regional papers presented at the 8th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, University of Sydney 16-21 August 1987, 150-161. Australia: Applied Linguistics Association of Australia. Lowenberg, Peter. .H. 1991. Variation in Malaysian English: the pragmatics of languages in contact. In Cheshire, Jenny (ed.), English around the world: sociolinguistic perspectives, 364-375. Cambridge: University Press. Luke, Kang Kwong. 1990. Utterance particles in Cantonese conversations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Malmkjær Kirsten and John Williams. 1998. Context in language learning and language understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maschler, Yael. 1994. Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversation. Language in society 23(3), 325-66. Maschler, Yael. 1998. The discourse markers segmenting Israeli Hebrew Talk-ininteraction. In Jucker, A. and Yael Ziv Discourse markers: descriptions and theory, 13-59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 342 Matsui, Tomoko. 2000. Linguistic encoding of the guarantee of relevance: Japanese sentence-final particle yo. In Andersen, Gisle and Thorstein Fretheim (eds.). Pragmatic markers and propositional attitude, 145-172. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Matsui, Tomoko. 2002. Semantics and pragmatics of a Japanese discourse marker dakara (so/in other words): a unitary account. Journal of pragmatics 34: 867-891. Matthews, Stephen and Virginia Yip. 1994. Cantonese: a comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge. Mey, Jacob L. 1994. (First printed 1993). Pragmatics: an introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Miskovic, Mirjana. 2001. The particle bas in contemporary Serbian. Pragmatics 11(1):17-30. Moeschler, Jacques. 1993. Relevance and conversation. Lingua 90: 149-171. Nelson, Gerald. 1996. The design of the corpus. In Greenbaum, Sydney. (ed.) Comparing English Worldwide: the international corpus of English, 27-35. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Newmeyer Frederick J. 1988. Linguistics: The Cambridge survey. Volume IV. Language: The socio-cultural context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ni, Yibin. 1996. The interpretation of English noun phrase with particular regard to generic reference. Unpublished Ph.D thesis. University College London. Ni, Yibin and Ler, Soon Lay. 2001. Wordforms and their linguistic and cultural implications: a comparison between two corpora in the International corpus of English. In Brown, Adam (ed.), English in Southeast Asia 99: proceedings of the Fourth ‘English in Southeast Asia’ Conference, 159-177. Singapore: National Institute of Education, National Technological University. Nicolle, Steve. 1997. A relevance-theoretic account of be going to. Journal of Linguistics 33:355-277. Nicolle, Steve. 1998. A relevance theory perspective on grammaticalization. Cognitive Linguistics 9:1-35. Nicolle, Steve. 2000a. Communicated and on-communicated acts in relevance theory. Pragmatics. 10:2. 233-245. Nicolle, Steve. 2000b. Markers of general interpretive use in Amharic and Swahili. In Andersen, Gisle and Thorstein. Fretheim (eds.) Pragmatic markers and propositional attitude, 173-188. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nicolle, Steve. 2003. Mental models theory and relevance theory in quantificational reasoning. Pragmatics and cognition 11:2, 345-378. 343 Ooi, Vincent Beng Yeow. 2001. Evolving identities: the English Language in Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore: Times Academic Press. Oostdijk, Netleke & Pieter de Haan (eds.). language. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1994. Corpus-based research into Östman, Jan-Ola. 1981. You know: a discourse-functional approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Overstreet, Maryann and George Yule. 2002. The metapragmatics of and everything. Journal of pragmatics 34: 785-794. Oxford English Dictionary 1989. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Oxford English Dictionary Internet version. Pakir, Anne. 1992. Dictionary entries for discourse particles. In Pakir, Anne (ed.) Words in a cultural context, 143-152. Singapore: Singapore UniPress. Pakir, Anne (ed) 1992. Words in a cultural context. Singapore: Singapore UniPress. Pakir, Anne (ed.). 1995. The English language in Singapore: implications for teaching. Singapore: Singapore Association for Applied Linguistics. Papafragou, Anna. 2002. Mindreading and verbal communication. . Mind and Language Vol. 17 Nos. and 2, 55-67. Oxford: Blackwell. Pilkington, Adrian. 1991. The literary reading process: a relevance theory perspective. In Ibsch, Schram and Steen (eds.) Empirical studies of literature: proceedings of the second IGEL conference, 1989. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Platt, John. 1978. The concept of a ‘creoloid’ exemplification: basilectal Singapore English. Papers in pidgin and Creole studies I, 53-65. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Platt, John. 1987. Communicative functions of particles in Singapore English. In Stelle, Ross and Terry Threadgold (eds), Language topics: essays in honour of Michael Halliday, Vol 1, 391-401. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Platt, John and Heidi Weber. 1980. English in Singapore and Malaysia: status, features, functions. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Platt, John, Heidi Weber and Ho Mian Lian. 1983. Singapore and Malaysia: varieties of English around the World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pojman Louis P. 1996. The quest for truth. 3rd Edition. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company. 344 Pomerantez, Anita. 1984. Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some forms of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In Arkinson, Maxwell J. and John Heritage (eds.), Structures of social action: studies in conversation analysis, 57-101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Preshous, Andrew. 2001. Where are you going ah? English Today. 65, Vol. 17, No. 1, 46-53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pusch, Claus D. 2000. The attitudinal meaning of preverbal markers in Gascon: insights from the analysis of literary and spoken language data. In Andersen, Gisle and Thorstein Fretheim (eds.) Pragmatic markers and propositional attitude, 189206. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Quirk, Randolph and Sidney Greenbaum. 1973. A university grammar of English. London: Longman. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Récanati, Francois. 1987. Meaning and force: the pragmatics of performative uttrances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Redeker, Gisela. 1991. 29:1139-1172. Linguistic markers of discourse structure. Linguistics Rouchota, Villy. 1998. Procedural meaning and parenthetical discourse markers. In Jucker, Andreas and Yael Ziv (eds.), Discourse markers: descriptions and theory, 97-126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Rouchota, Villy and Andreas H. Jucker. 1998. Current issues in relevance theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rubdy, Rani. 2001. Creative destruction: Singapore’s speak good English movement. World Englishes 29(3):341-355. Richards, Jack and Mary Tay. 1977. The la particle in Singapore English. In Crewe, William (ed.) The English language in Singapore, 141-156. Singapore: Eastern University Press. Sanford, Anthony J. 2002. Context, attention and depth of processing during interpretation. Mind and language Vol. 17 Nos. and 2, 188-206 Oxford: Blackwell. Schiffrin Deborah. 1987. Discourse particles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schourup, Lawrence. 1985. Common discourse particles in English conversation: ‘like’, ‘well’, ‘y’know’. New York: Garland. Searle, John. 1969. Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 345 Searle, John. 1975. Indirect speech acts. In Cole, Peter and Joan Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: speech acts, 59-82. New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in Davis, Steven (ed.), 1991. Pragmatics 265-277. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle, John and Daniel Vanderveken. 1985. Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sikorska, Liliana. 2000. Hir not lettyrd: The use of interjections, pragmatic markers and whan-clauses in The Book of Margery Kempe. In Taavitsaine, Irma, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (eds.) Placing middle English in context, 397-409. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Smith, Ian. 1985. Multilingualism and diffusion: a case study from Singapore English. Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics Vol XI:2, 105-128. Smith, Neil. 1983. On interpreting conditionals. Australian journal of linguistics 3.1:1-23. Smith, Neil. and Deirdre Wilson. 1992. Introduction. Lingua 87:1-10. Sperber, Dan. 1994. ‘Understanding verbal understanding’. In Khalfa, Jean (ed.), What is intelligence? 179-198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan. 1994. The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations. In Hirschfeld, Lawrence and Susan Gelman (eds.), Mapping the mind: domain-specificity in cognition and culture, 39-67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan. 2001. In defense of massive modularity. In Dupoux, Emmanuel (ed.), Language, brain, and cognitive development: essays in honor of Jacques Mehler. 47-57. Cambridge; Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 2nd edn (with postface) 1995. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. Forthcoming. Relevance and meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 2002. Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading. Mind and language 17, 3-23. Special issue on Pragmatics and Cognitive Science. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan, Francesco Cara, and Vittorio Girotto. 1995. Relevance theory explains the selection task. Cognition 57, 31-95. Elsevier Science. Stalnaker, Robert C. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of philosophical logic 2:447457. 346 Stalnaker, Robert C. 1977. Pragmatic presuppositions [1974]. In Rogers, Andy, Bob Wall and John P. Murphy (eds.), Proceedings of the Texas conference on performances, presuppositions, and implicatures, 135-147. Washington D. C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Stenström, Anna-Brita. 1994. Longman. An introduction to spoken interaction. London: Stewart, Ian. 1980. The seizing of Singapore. London: Hamlyn. Stockdale, James B. 1984. A Vietnam experience: then years of reflection. USA: Hoover Press. Stubbs, Michael. 1996. Text and corpus analysis: computer-assisted studies of language and culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Takeuchi Michiko. 1998. Conceptual and procedural encoding: cause-consequence conjunctive particles in Japanese. In Rouchota, Villy and Andreas Jucker (eds.), Current issues in relevance theory, 81-104. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Talbot, Mary M. 1997. Relevance. In Lamarque, Peter (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of philosophy of language. New York: Pergamon. Tan, Adrian. 1989. The Teenage Workbook. Singapore: Hotspot Books. Tay, Mary and Anthea Fraser Gupta. 1983. Towards a description of standard Singapore English. Varieties of English in Southeast Asia. Singapore: RELC Anthology Series 11. Tay, Mary Wan Joo. 1988. Code switching and code mixing as a communicative strategy in multilingual discourse. In McCarthy, Brian (ed.) Asian-Pacific Papers [Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, Occasional Papers 2], 43-57. In World Englishes 8(3), 1989, 407-417. Teng, Su Ching and Ho Mian Lian (eds.) 1995. The English language in Singapore: implications for teaching. Singapore: Singapore Association for Applied Linguisitcs. Times-Chambers Essential English d, dictionary, 2nd edition 1997. Singapore: Federal Publications Tolkien, John R. R. 2001. (First published 1954). The lord of the rings. Great Britain: HarperCollins. Tongue, Ray K. 1974. The English of Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press Sdn. Bhd. Turner, Roy. 1974. Ethnomethodology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 347 Vandelanotte, Lieven. 2004. Deixis and grounding in speech and thought representation. Journal of pragmatics 36: 489-520. Elsevier. Vanderveken, Daniel and Susumu Kubo. 2001. Essays in Speech Act Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Verschueren, Jef et al (eds.). 1995. Handbook of pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wee, Lionel. 1998. The lexicon of Singapore English, Chapter Seven. In Foley, Joseph A. et al (eds.) English in new cultural contexts: reflections from Singapore, 174-200. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Wee, Lionel. 2002. Lor in colloquial Singapore English. Journal of pragmatics 34: 711-725. Elsevier. Wee, Lionel. 2004. Reduplication and discourse particles. In Lim. Lisa (ed.), Singapore English: a grammatical description, 105-126. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1986. Introduction. Journal of pragmatics. Vol 10;5:519-534. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics, primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Widdowson, Henry. 1998. The conditions of contextual meaning. In Kirsten, Malmkjær and John Williams (eds.) Context in language learning and language understanding. 44-59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilma, Vimala Marie. 1987. A study of sentence-final particles in Singapore English. Unpublished Academic Exercise. Singapore: National University of Singapore. Wilson Deirdre. 1994. Relevance and understanding. In Brown, Gillian, Kirsten Malmkjær, Alastair Pollit, and John Williams (eds.) Language and understanding, 35-58. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson Deirdre. 1999. Relevance and Relevance Theory. In Wilson, R. and G. Chierchia (eds.) MITECS Encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences, 719-720. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber. 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90:1-25. Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber. 2004. Relevance theory. In Horn, Laurence and Gregory Ward (eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 607-632. Oxford: Blackwell. 348 Wong, Jock Onn. 1994. A Wierzbickan approach to Singlish particles. MA dissertation. Singapore: Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. Wong, Jock Onn. Services Pte Ltd. 2000 The ‘mE’ particle of Singlish. Singapore: Pagesetters Wong, Jock. 2004. The particles of Singapore English: a semantic and cultural interpretation. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 739-793. Elsevier. Yus, Francisco Ramos. 1998. A decade of relevance theory. Journal of pragmatics 30: 305-345. Yus, Francisco Ramos. 1999. Review of Cartson, Robyn and Seiji Uchida (eds.) Relevance theory: applications and implications’. Journal of pragmatics 31: 851859. Yus, Francisco Ramos. 2000. Review of Rouchota, Villy and Andreas Jucker (eds.). Current issues in relevance theory. Journal of pragmatics 32: 839-845. Žegarac, Vlad and Billy Clark. 1999. Phatic interpretations and phatic communication in Journal of Linguistics 35, 321-346. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Zwicky, Arnold M. 1985. Clitics and particles. Language 61:283-305. 349 Appendix A The design of an ICE corpus ‰ spoken (300: S1A-001 - S2B-050) ♦ dialogues (180: S1A-001 - S1B-080) • private (100: S1A-001 - S1A-100) ƒ face-to-face conversations (90: S1A-001 - S1A-090) ƒ telephone conversations (10: S1A-091 - S1A- 100) • public (80: S1B-001 - S1B-080) ƒ class lessons (20: S1B-001 - S1B- 020) ƒ broadcast discussions (20: S1B-021 - S1B- 040) ƒ broadcast interviews (10: S1B-041 - S1B- 050) ƒ parliamentary debates (10: S1B-051 - S1B- 060) ƒ legal cross-examinations (10: S1B-061 - S1B- 070) ƒ business transactions (10: S1B-071 - S1B- 080) ♦ monologues (120: S2a-001 - S2B- 050) • unscripted (70: S2A-001 - S2A- 070) ƒ spontaneous commentaries (20: S2A-001 - S2A- 020) ƒ unscripted speeches: lectures (30: S2A-021 - S2A- 050) ƒ demonstrations (10: S2A-051 - S2A- 060) ƒ legal presentations (10: S2A-061 - S2A- 070) • scripted (50: S2B-001 - S2B- 050) ƒ broadcast news (20: S2B-001 - S2B- 020) ƒ broadcast talks (20: S2B-021 - S2B- 040) ƒ speeches (not broadcast) (10: S2B-041 - S2B- 050) ‰ written (200: W1A-001 - W2F-020) ♦ non-printed (50: W1A-001 - W1B-030) • non-professional writing (20: W1A-001 - W1A-020) ƒ student untimed essays (10: W1A-001 - W1A-010) ƒ student examination essays (10: W1A-001 - W1A-020) • correspondence (30: W1B-001 - W1B-030) ƒ social letters (15: W1B-001 - W1B-015) ƒ business letters (15: W1B-016 - W1B-030) ♦ printed (150: W2A-001 - W2F-020) • informational (100: W2A-001 - W2C-020) ƒ learned (40: W2A-001 - W2A-040) - humanities (10: W2A-001 - W2A-010) - social sciences (10: W2A-011 - W2A-020) - natural sciences (10: W2A-021 - W2A-030) - technology (10: W2A-031 - W2A-040) ƒ popular (40: W2B-001 - W2B-040) - humanities (10: W2B-001 - W2B-010) - social sciences (10: W2B-011 - W2B-020) - natural sciences (10: W2B-021 - W2B-030) - technology (10: W2B-031 - W2B-040) ƒ reportage (20: W2C-001 - W2C-020) - press news reports • instructional (20: W2D-001 - W2D-020) ƒ administrative / regulatory (10: W2D-001 - W2D-010) ƒ skills / hobbies (10: W2D-011 - W2D-020) • persuasive (10: W2E-001 - W2E-010) ƒ press editorials • creative (20: W2F-001 - W2F-020) ƒ novels / stories 350 Appendix B Survey Dear respondent, Thank you for agreeing to participate in this survey. My name is Vivien Ler and I am interested in finding out how you and other language users perceive the use of discourse particles (e.g. lah, meh, hor etc.) in Singapore Colloquial English. This questionnaire comprises three sections and the entire exercise should take no more than 20 minutes to complete. I thank you again for your help. Gender Male □ Female □ Are you a Singaporean? Yes □ No □ Age range 16-20 yrs □ □ 20-30 yrs If not, how long have you been in Singapore? 30-35 yrs □ >35 yrs □ □ years _____________________________________________________________________ Section A A set of 12 utterances is given. After each utterance, please indicate whether it is acceptable to you or not, assuming that there are no other contextual factors involved. Acceptable 1. He’s asleep meh? 2. Is Daniel going home lah? 3. Where are you meh? 4. The VCD is spoilt hor. 5. Does he have a dog lah? 6. Where are you going hor! 7. What a big boat meh! (an exclamation) 8. Darren, who is Sally’s husband hor, can cook very well. □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ Odd □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ 351 9. Raymond’s asleep lah? (a question) 10. Eat your food lah. 11. What a big car hor? (an exclamation) 12. Did you go home meh? □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ _____________________________________________________________________ Section B You are given the following set of sentences. You are to report what is said by the speaker to someone else. Write the reported sentence below it. E.g. Ryan says, “I’m going to watch football on TV tomorrow.” Ryan said that he was going to watch football on TV the next day. 1. Susan: Let’s go line dancing at Marine Parade Promenade hor? __________________________________________________________________ 2. Daniel: Come with us lah. __________________________________________________________________ 3. Alan: Michael Jackson fainted meh? __________________________________________________________________ 4. Patrick says, ‘Pauline is not married lah’. __________________________________________________________________ 5. John says, “She’s so cute hor?” __________________________________________________________________ 6. You mean at home cannot sleep with aircon meh? __________________________________________________________________ 352 Section C The following is a dialogue between two friends. What the words in italics mean to you? A: Make sure there's some food for the kids lah. B: Why the adults no need to eat meh? A: Adults you got to cater. The kids get hungry easily. B: So what are you going to cook? A: Either chicken wing, bee hoon or fried rice lor B: Bee hoon. You cook bee hoon hor? A: Okay lah, fried bee hoon. B: But today got some rice left leh. A: Got meh? B: Ya. Very easy to fry. Just pan and sausage give me the egg with the rice. State briefly what you think the following items mean to you. lah _________________________________________________________ meh ________________________________________________________ hor ________________________________________________________ Thank you very much for your help 353 Appendix C Results Of Survey Total number of respondents: 25 (Male - 4, Female - 21) Age: 16-20 (18), 20-30 (4), 30-35 (3) Singaporeans: All Utterance 1. He’s asleep meh? Acceptable No. % 24 96 Odd No. % 2. Is Daniel going home lah? 25 100 3. Where are you meh? 25 100 4. The VCD is spoilt hor. 18 72 28 5. Does he have a dog lah? 16 21 84 6. Where are you going hor? 12 22 88 7. What a big boat meh! (an exclamation) 23 92 8. Darren, who is Sally’s husband hor, can cook very well. 21 84 16 9. Raymond’s asleep lah? (a question) 16 21 84 10. Eat your food lah. 25 100 11. What a big car hor! (an exclamation) 16 64 36 12. Did you go home meh? 13 52 12 48 354 . 355 [...]... by providing an in- depth systematic study on the encoded meaning of these discourse particles and as argued above, an adequate account of discourse particles in Singapore English requires an account of the cognitive processes involved in interpreting them in discourse In the next section, I place the interpretation of discourse particles in the context where they are mostly found, that is, in verbal... extralinguistic inferential processing of the stimulus containing it In this study, I use the term ‘encoded meaning’ to refer to the kinds of constraints on the pragmatic, or extralinguistic inferences that the addressee processing an utterance will 7 The number of discourse particles in Singapore English is still unclear Gupta (1992) identifies 11 discourse particles of Singapore Colloquial English, including... of data used in the study The rest of the chapter discusses the aims and scope of the current study, and the significance of the study 1.2.1 Singapore English and discourse particles New Englishes such as Singapore English are newly emerging languages which have evolved out of contact with existing varieties of English as well as indigenous or background languages (Weinreich 1953) The development of. .. explained by a direct formmeaning mapping but only by taking into account the intentional and inferential and indeed the interactional umbrella How is this related to our study of discourse particles? As mentioned above (Section 1.1.2), in this study utterance meaning is derived from both decoding the linguistic form and inference because part of the utterance meaning can only be derived as a result of. .. hearer’s inferential (extra-linguistic) processing In other words, the meaning of discourse particles includes the encoded meaning and pragmatic inferences that the hearer will draw on in her effort to understand the intended message Let us take a look at an example of a discourse particle lah in Singapore English and how it can be used The examples are my own or taken from 17 the Singapore component of. .. motivates distribution Ways of managing discourse for Singaporeans may be different from the ways other users of the language manage discourse The main purpose of the research, then, is to carry out a corpus-based in- depth analysis focussed on describing the encoded meanings of the discourse particles in SCE and how they are interpreted in discourse 20 For example, language has a grammar and is used to communicate... challenge of describing the discourse particles in Singapore English as they are encountered in real contexts of use in extended stretches of discourse Thus, taking the revelations of recent research into account, the study will make use of the ICE-SIN corpus collected at the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore In addition to the 600,000-word ICE-SIN corpus,... roles, at maintaining social ties and influencing others’ (Aitchison 1996:25) One of the elements of language which fulfil the social function and that of influencing others is the use of discourse particles The present study looks at human communication, in general, and the role of discourse particles in communication, in particular What does linguistic communication involve? How are utterances understood?... relevance theory This study describes the particles in terms of the kind of information they encode (unified meaning), how the different functions follow from the unified meaning and the contexts that the particles are unlikely to occur in The findings from the study reveal that the multifunctionality of the particles can be addressed by postulating a single procedure The unified meaning of a discourse particle... discourse particles used in Singapore Colloquial English such as okay and I mean Thus, in this 6 study, I propose the following provisional definition of discourse particles Discourse particles are monomorphemic expressions which encode propositional attitude In Singapore Colloquial English, discourse particles include lah, meh, hor, leh, lor, ma, what and hah7 1.1.2 Meaning In this section, for clarity, . and other discourse particles used in Singapore Colloquial English such as okay and I mean. Thus, in this 7 study, I propose the following provisional definition of discourse particles. Discourse. Introduction 1 1.1.1 Definition of discourse particles 3 1.1.2 Meaning 7 1.2 Background 12 1.2.1 Singapore English and discourse particles 12 1.2.2 Discourse particles and. Colloquial Singapore English DVD : Digital Video Disc GSEC : Grammar of Singapore English Corpus ICE-SIN : Singapore corpus of ICE (International corpus of English) MRT : Mass Rapid Transit