‘If you are a Tampines resident clamouring for “mall, mall, mall” so as to enjoy greater shopping choices, ...’ (Sunday Times, 8 March 2009).
Obviously this was a pun on ‘clamouring for more’: in Singapore, the words mall and more are homophones for many speakers because the final /l/ consonant in mall is deleted or vocalized (i.e. becomes a vowel).
This phenomenon, known as /l/-vocalization, appears to be most common among ethnic Chinese speakers of English because, in Mandarin and the more common ‘dialects’ (e.g. Hokkien, Teochew), /l/ is not possible in the coda of a syllable. Contrast this with Malay and Tamil, which have words and indeed names like pukul and Tamil.
A grammatical error crops up later in the same quote: greater choices. Since choices here is used here as a countable noun, it should read more choices.
No doubt greater can mean ‘more’, but in this sense it goes only with uncountable nouns, e.g. greater choice/variety. (Choice can be used either as a countable or an uncountable noun.)
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