On an emotive particle in Singlish, SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 26/02/2016

http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/
This seminar titled "On an emotive particle in Singlish" was given by Tania Kuteva, Seongha Rhee, Debra Ziegeler, and Jessica Sabban as part of the  Linguistics Departmental Seminar Series at SOAS University of London on 16 February 2016.

Find out more about this event at http://goo.gl/jxB9SS

Our object of investigation in this study is sentence-final what in Singapore Colloquial English (Singlish). As a number of studies have shown already, the primary function of what when used at the end of the sentence in Singlish is to mark objection; hence the term proposed for it in the literature, “objection particle”:

(1)  Singapore Colloquial English (Smith 1985: 126)

(Context: Discussion of a student who is going overseas for one month and missing classes)

A: He’ll never pass the third year.

B: It’s only for one month what.

Smith 1985 describes the above use of sentence-final what in SCE as an emotive particle, which – in addition to its fixed position at the end of the sentence – exhibits the following two characteristics:

(i) intonation drop plus low pitch, and;

(ii) indication that the speaker objects to something in the context.

It is our goal here to unravel the mystery of this „weird“ use of what in SCE as an emotive particle.

In previous studies sentence-final what in SCE has been treated as the result of language transfer from the local, substrate languages, e.g. Hokkien Chinese, Cantonese, etc. The present proposal radically differs from existing analyses: the standpoint we take here is that Singlish sentence-final what (a) originated in the lexifier (non-local) language, British English, and; (b) its development can be placed within a cross-linguistically identifiable functional network.