Colloquial Singapore English has a novel conditional construction in which the conditional clause is not marked morphosyntactically, and must precede the consequent clause. We show that Singapore English, like Chinese, the main substrate language, is topic prominent, and the novel conditional construction is a direct consequence of this new typological status. We analyze the unmarked conditional clause as topic, a basic syntactic position in topic prominent languages. Our analysis shows that substrate influence is systemic: the entire cluster of properties associated with topic prominence is transferred from Chinese to Singapore English.
2011. Singapore English. Language and Linguistics Compass 5:1 ► pp. 47 ff.
Sato, Yosuke
2011. Radical Pro Drop and Fusional Pronominal Morphology in Colloquial Singapore English: Reply to Neeleman and Szendrői. Linguistic Inquiry 42:2 ► pp. 356 ff.
SATO, YOSUKE
2014. Argument ellipsis in Colloquial Singapore English and the Anti-Agreement Hypothesis. Journal of Linguistics 50:2 ► pp. 365 ff.
Sato, Yosuke
2016. Remarks on the Parameters of Argument Ellipsis: A New Perspective from Colloquial Singapore English. Syntax 19:4 ► pp. 392 ff.
Sato, Yosuke & Chonghyuck Kim
2012. Radical pro drop and the role of syntactic agreement in Colloquial Singapore English. Lingua 122:8 ► pp. 858 ff.
SCHRÖTER, VERENA & BERND KORTMANN
2016. Pronoun deletion in Hong Kong English and Colloquial Singaporean English. World Englishes 35:2 ► pp. 221 ff.
Sze, Felix
2015. Is Hong Kong Sign Language a topic-prominent language?. Linguistics 53:4
Vaish, Viniti
2020. The Linguistic Ecology of Singapore. In Translanguaging in Multilingual English Classrooms, ► pp. 11 ff.
ZHIMING, BAO
2012. Substratum transfer targets grammatical system. Journal of Linguistics 48:2 ► pp. 479 ff.
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