Lionel Wee

List of John Benjamins publications for which Lionel Wee plays a role.

Book series

Journal

Title

The Politics of English: South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific

Edited by Lionel Wee, Robbie B.H. Goh and Lisa Lim

[Studies in World Language Problems, 4] 2013. ix, 322 pp.
Subjects English linguistics | Language policy | Sociolinguistics and Dialectology
Wee, Lionel 2022 GlobalizationHandbook of Pragmatics: 25th Annual Installment, Brisard, Frank, Sigurd D’hondt, Pedro Gras and Mieke Vandenbroucke (eds.), pp. 91–106 | Chapter
Wee, Lionel 2017 The party’s over? Singapore politics and the ‘new normal’Language and Citizenship: Broadening the agenda, Milani, Tommaso M. (ed.), pp. 137–160 | Article
This paper highlights the dynamic nature of the relationship between government and society, drawing on as a case study the changing relationship between the Singapore government and the citizenry. I discuss the conditions under which the People’s Action Party is under pressure to change its style… read more
Wee, Lionel 2016 Situating affect in linguistic landscapesLinguistic Landscape 2:2, pp. 105–126 | Article
Wee, Lionel 2015 Adding insult to inquiryPragmatics and Society 6:1, pp. 1–21 | Article
While compliments are usually intended to give credit and insults offense, the latter cannot simply be treated as opposites of the former. For example, a speaker can give credit to others as well as himself/herself. But while a speaker can offend others, it is less clear that a speaker can offend… read more
Wee, Lionel 2015 The party’s over? Singapore politics and the ‘new normal’Language & Citizenship, Milani, Tommaso M. (ed.), pp. 455–478 | Article
This paper highlights the dynamic nature of the relationship between government and society, drawing on as a case study the changing relationship between the Singapore government and the citizenry. I discuss the conditions under which the People’s Action Party is under pressure to change its style… read more
Wee, Lionel 2014 The Evolution of Singlish: Beyond Phase 5?The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyond, Buschfeld, Sarah, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch (eds.), pp. 126–141 | Article
This paper focuses on the development of Singlish and shows that the study of Singlish provides us with useful information about how the development of (varieties of) English is related to issues of language, identity and culture in a rapidly globalizing world. As such, it raises the important… read more
A critical assessment of Singapore’s language policy, focusing specifically on issues and challenges that arise from the government’s positioning of the English language, shows how the policy needs to be understood in relation to the government’s attempt to maintain harmony in an… read more
Wee, Lionel, Lisa Lim and Robbie B.H. Goh 2013 16. ConclusionThe Politics of English: South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific, Wee, Lionel, Robbie B.H. Goh and Lisa Lim (eds.), pp. 303–316 | Article
The emergence of enterprise culture has raised the issue of how techniques of governmentality are being used to re-make individuals and institutions as bearers of enterprising qualities. This paper examines one such specific technique of governmentality, that of the ranked list. The ranked list is… read more
Kim, Chonghyuck and Lionel Wee 2009 Resolving the paradox of Singapore English horEnglish World-Wide 30:3, pp. 241–261 | Article
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… read more
Wee, Lionel 2006 The cultural basis of metaphor revisitedPragmatics & Cognition 14:1, pp. 111–128 | Article
Just how foundational metaphor is to cultural understanding has been a matter of considerable debate, manifested in the question of whether cultural models are, at bottom, based on conceptual metaphors (Gibbs 1994; Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Quinn 1991). This paper revisits this debate… read more
Wee, Lionel 2004 5. Reduplication and discourse particlesSingapore English: A grammatical description, Lim, Lisa (ed.), pp. 105–128 | Chapter
Wee, Lionel and Umberto Ansaldo 2004 3. Nouns and noun phrasesSingapore English: A grammatical description, Lim, Lisa (ed.), pp. 57–74 | Chapter
This article investigates the role of metaphor in the production and reproduction of language ideologies. It does this by focusing on official discourses concerning the language policy of Singapore, where recurrent appeal is made to the conduit metaphor (Reddy 1993) in articulating various claims… read more
Alsagoff, Lubna, Zhiming Bao and Lionel Wee 1998 Why You Talk Like That? The Pragmatics of a Why Construction in Singapore EnglishEnglish World-Wide 19:2, pp. 247–260 | Article
In this paper, we examine one wh-construction in Singapore English, which signals a demand for justification, and show that there is a systematic correlation between its structural and pragmatic properties. We suggest that this wh-construction is based on the imperative, and inherits the… read more