English World-Wide - Volume 30, Issue 3, 2009

In this paper, we present paradoxical properties of the discourse particle hor in Singapore English and attempt to resolve them. Hor has been described as an attenuator of illocutionary force, which is used to convert statements and commands into questions and requests. We provide a new observation that it can also be used as a booster of illocutionary force to make strong statements and demands. We claim that these paradoxical properties are consequences of hor’s nature to mark a nonstandard discourse context in which there is an asymmetry in epistemic or deontic authority between speaker and hearer vis-à-vis a proposition. In a context where epistemic / deontic authority for a proposition lies with the speaker, hor serves as a booster of illocutionary force. In a context where such authority rests with the hearer, hor serves as an attenuator.

This study is concerned with the occasional lack of verbal past tense marking in Singapore English, which has been described both as evidence for morphological change and as a phonological consequence of final plosive deletion. Based on a corpus of spoken educated Singapore English, it is investigated whether the lack of past tense marking in verbs in a past tense context is due primarily to morphological or phonological factors and whether word frequency influences the rate of past tense marking. The results are interpreted as evidence for a phonological basis of most unmarked verb forms in Singapore English and suggest a shift in the function of the present tense. They further imply that past tense marking in Singapore English varies with sociolinguistic factors.

This article traces the evolution of the English-language speech community in Hong Kong since the early 1840s. Inspired by Schneider’s (2007) innovative “Dynamic Model”, the article examines textual and statistical data derived from a range of hitherto unexploited archival sources, including a historical corpus of English-language newspapers, confidential Colonial Office correspondence, and government records. Changes in the size and composition of the English-language speech community are tracked through a diachronic analysis of government censuses, school enrolments, lists of jurors, and letters to the press. The results of this analysis support Schneider’s contention that the 1960s marked an important turning point in Hong Kong’s linguistic history in that it presaged a substantial, education-driven increase in the numbers and proportion of English users in the territory. Despite the significant expansion of the English-using community in the past four decades, the dominant theme of public discourse about English has been that of “declining standards”. While the existence of a “complaint tradition” accords with the predictions of the Dynamic Model, it is perhaps not widely known that this tradition is a long-standing one. The present article traces this tradition back to the era of the Opium Wars.

The acoustic study of consonants has lagged considerably behind that of vowels. While a robust literature exists about vowel shifting, vowel quality, and the sociolinguistic significance of vowels, comparable literature is lacking for the acoustic quality of liquids. This study seeks to supplement the acoustic studies of vowels by analyzing characteristics of the liquid /l/ in its word-initial context. Traditionally, phonologists have subdivided /l/ into two allophones: dark and light, although current analysis has characterized these distinctions as gradient, not discrete. Word-initial /l/ is thought to be the canonically lightest variant of the phoneme, but cross-dialectal research has shown great acoustic variance in its phonetic realization. This case study aims to trace the phoneme through three generations of Chicano English speakers from South Texas, and to draw conclusions about how its variation among speakers and generations can shed light on other sociolinguistic phenomena, such as the persistence of substrate features from Spanish (with its characteristically light /l/s) or assimilation into mainstream American English dialects (with their characteristically dark /l/s). The study shows that there is indeed significant shift in the lightness of /l/ — independent of phonetic context — across the generations of speakers under examination. This result supports other studies that show notable assimilation with Anglo English varieties in earlier generations, but robust use of ethnically-marked phonological features among recent generations.