Topic–comment

The above (Sunday Times, 12 May 2013) is an interesting example of a topic–comment (or left-dislocation) structure in Singapore English (SgE).

Where Standard English has the sentence structure subject–predicate, SgE often has topic–comment, where the topic of the sentence is stated, and then a comment is added to it. 

In the sentence above, the topic of the sentence is Linna Tay, mother of national swimmer Jerryl Yong begins the sentence; for may be thought of as a topic marker which separates the topic from the comment. In the comment clause, the topic ‘reappears’ as the subject; this is called a resumptive pronoun.

(A subject–predicate counterpart of the above would be Linna Tay, mother of national swimmer Jerryl Yong, has to ....)

While topic–comment is more typical of Singapore Colloquial English (SCE, or Singlish), it is also fairly common in more formal uses (such as formal newspaper reports and student essays), which led me to argue in my PhD thesis (Cambridge, 2007) that there is good reason to believe that all of SgE is, in fact, underlyingly topic–comment rather than subject–predicate.

Departmental Store

Singapore English (especially Singapore Colloquial English, or Singlish) is often thought to be shorter and sweeter than Standard English, but this is not always the case.

As this example, seen in a shopping mall in Singapore, shows, the Standard English term, department store, is in fact shorter than the Singapore English equivalent, departmental store.

Will

In Standard English, habitual events are usually expressed using verbs in the simple present tense, e.g. I go for a jog every morning before heading to work.

In Singapore English, however, this is very often expressed using the modal verb will, as in the example above: During his daily commute to work, Mr Henry Kwok will whip out his Samsung Galaxy Note ... (Straits Times Digital Life supplement, 9 January 2013). This is no doubt an influence from Chinese, which uses 会 (huì) to express habitual events.

Noncount Nouns

This an advertisement on the Straits Times website.  The noun stuff is noncount in Standard English, but in Singapore English is often used as count (as the plural –s suffix suggests).

Other common noncount nouns used as count in Singapore English include markings (e.g. As an English teacher, I have lots of markings to do), junks, jargons, terminologies, and slangs.

Keep

In Singapore English the verb keep has the meaning of ‘to put away’ — as was obviously intended in the excerpt above.

In Standard English, however, keep describes a state and not an action; and, as noted by Adam Brown in his excellent Singapore English in a Nutshell, it is very often synonymous with possess, remain or retain.

No Outside Food

In Singapore, signs like the above are very common.  You’ll find them in restaurants and cafés whose owners, perhaps understandably, want to restrict the use of their tables to their customers.  In this context, the term outside food refers to food bought elsewhere, i.e. not from the restaurant or café displaying the sign.  It may also be used as an antonym of home-cooked food.

Among campaigners for good English in Singapore, there is a sense that the above message is non-standard and hence to be discouraged.  The following sign appears to be an attempt at expressing the same message in Standard English.

I am not entirely sure that this is an improvement, for it does not sound very idiomatic either, i.e. not something a native speaker (however you choose to define her or him) would say.  Perhaps it is necessary to recast it more radically, as any one of the following (or variants thereof):

These tables are for the consumption of food purchased/bought here only.

These tables are for our customers only.

Only for the consumption of food purchased here.

Only for food purchased here.

Not for the consumption of food bought elsewhere.

You’ll probably agree that this little exercise is a good example of a cure being worse than the original ailment!  Note that, by comparison with any of the above, the original message, No outside food allowed, is beautifully concise, precise and immediately comprehensible, at least in Singapore.

Regret About/For

Here are two examples of superfluous prepositions in Singapore English (SgE), the first from the broadsheet The Straits Times (15 February 2010) and the other from a notice at one of Singapore’s more popular museums.

In Standard English (StdE), regret as a verb is transitive, meaning it takes a direct object (underlined) and no preposition, e.g. He regretted his indecision over the sale.  Similarly, StdE would have He regretted what had happened and We regret (any) inconvenience caused where the SgE examples above have regretted about and regret for.

In SgE, the use of prepositions with (what in StdE are) transitive verbs is very common.  Typical examples include discuss about, emphasize on, source for, relook at, rework on, study/research on, partner with, demand for and request for. 

On the other hand, SgE uses some verbs transitively where in StdE they would be intransitive and require a preposition.  Hence, in SgE one may apply leave and reply him, whereas StdE would have these as apply for leave and reply to him.

The Kena Passive in Singapore English

In Standard English (StdE), passives are formed using a be passive auxiliary verb or a form of get.  By contrast, Singapore English (SgE), which does not have as complex a system of auxiliary and main verbs, uses kena (a word of Malay origin) to form the passive.  The SgE examples above may therefore be phrased in StdE as I was once fined, I got fined once, or If I was fined.  (The quote may be translated as ‘I was once fined for jaywalking. Quite embarrassing. If I’d been fined for speeding, then that would’ve been cool.’)

Interestingly, the SgE kena passive is what is known as an ‘adversative passive’ — one used for negative or undesirable outcomes.  Hence, The baby kena fed is all right if the baby had been fed poison, but not if it had been fed milk.  Likewise, if one were to say I kena appointed leader, it suggests the speaker did not want to be leader.

Car Park vs Parking Lot

In British English (BrE), drivers park their cars in a car park — or what American English (AmE) speakers call a parking lot.

In Singapore English (SgE), both terms are used, but with an interesting difference: the building or area where cars are parked is a car park (as in BrE), but each parking space is a parking lot.

As the picture (Straits Times, 30 March 2009) above shows, there are three cars in three parking spaces — or, in SgE, three parking lots (hence the plural). Indeed, the caption reads:

Ladies-only lots at Furama Riverfront Hotel are conspicuously painted pink so as to set them aside from the usual lots. Out of the 278 lots there, seven are set aside for women. The lots are located near the entrance to the hotel lobby.

Contrast this with the caption in the example below, from Time magazine (13 April 2009):

Cars may be sitting on lots like this one in Michigan, but should sell as the GDP rises.

As Time is American, it uses AmE parking lot for BrE car park.

Powderful Singlish



Nice examples of monophthongization of the diphthong in Coke and a not fully open front vowel in have.

I’m reliably told that this conversation was authentic, but to me it still sounds like a magnificent performance by the ‘auntie’!

Some Sundry Singaporeanisms

In Singapore it is common to see words and phrases enclosed within quotes for the purpose of emphasis and nothing more.

In the above sign, the writer obviously wishes to emphasize that the house is new, yet the quotes suggest that the claim is somewhat misleading or dishonest — it is as if he were saying the house is ‘so-called “new”’ when it was in fact completely rebuilt.

In the long-established Motoring magazine, emphatic quotes proliferate like a disease:

Now for another Singaporeanism: What does the word ‘live’ mean?


An animate object that is live would probably be moving — but how can a crab be live when it’s all hacked up and shrink-wrapped? Evidently, to some Singaporeans, live means something like ‘fresh, never frozen’.

Finally, something from the Straits Times (9 August 2008): ‘The alphabet “b” is for commissioners registered in Selangor’. The word needed here was letter, not alphabet. In Standard English, the word alphabet refers to the entire set of letters from a to z.

Null Subjects

This appeared on Channel NewsAsia’s website on 13 June 2008: ‘Malaysian PM says struck succession agreement with deputy’.

The full form of the sentence is, of course (omitted words underlined):

Malaysian PM says he has struck a succession agreement with his deputy.

The dropping of the subject pronoun he in the first sentence would be extremely unusual in Standard English. While pronouns are often dropped in special registers like diaries (think Bridget Jones’s Diary), this would not generally be allowed in embedded that-clauses.

Hence, while it would be possible in Standard English to say:

Ø Went to Oxford Street this morning.

where Ø denotes a dropped subject (known in theoretical syntax as a ‘null subject’), the following would not be possible:

Henry says Ø can meet me tonight.

This is despite that being omitted from the embedded that-clause. In Singapore English, however, null pronouns are so pervasive that they are commonly encountered even in formal written English, particularly in news headlines.

Bad English on the Buses

Seen on a Tibs bus: ‘To find out more about paying correct fares, it is available at...’

Make it To find out more about paying correct fares, visit or call...

The sentence as originally worded is reminiscent of topic–comment in Singlish, Chinese and Malay, where the topic is first stated (paying the correct fare) and a comment or more information is then added (it is available at...).

Other, perhaps more typical, examples include Japan, you can’t live cheaply (‘You can’t live cheaply in Japan) and My neighbour, he owns a famous restaurant (‘My neighbour owns a famous restaurant’).

Often, the comment portion has what is called a resumptive pronoun, which may be either a subject or an object — in the last example, the subject pronoun he refers back to the topic, my neighbour.

In our original example, we have a subject resumptive pronoun, it. But what does it refer to? Presumably the topic: loosely, finding out about paying correct fares.

Cut Your Hair

Grammar pedants love pouncing on the expression I’m going to cut my hair, arguing (wrongly) that this can only mean a DIY job — quite forgetting that context is as important as grammar in contributing to meaning.

For instance, in their book English in Singapore: An Introduction (McGraw-Hill, 2005) EL Low and A Brown suggest that I’m going to cut my hair ‘may sound very risky and penny-pinching to outsiders, for whom it unambiguously means that you are going to take a pair of scissors, look in the mirror and try to cut your own hair. It has an active feel to [Standard English] listeners…’ (p. 109).

No, it does not. As can been seen in the cartoon strip (in American Standard English dialogue), when the woman asks her husband, ‘Do you think I should cut my hair?’ he doesn’t wonder why she wouldn’t go to a hairdresser instead.

Disallow‘Students of a girls’ school go into a rant over their principal’s decision to disallow visit by an American boyband’ (subhead, Sunday Times, 4 November 2007).

Sunday Times, 2 December 2007

Sunday Times, 2 December 2007

In Singapore English, the opposite of allow is disallow. (And why not, since the opposite of agree is disagree?)

In Standard English, however, the word disallow is used when a referee refuses to let a goal stand, or when an appeal or objection to authority is rejected (see Singapore English in a Nutshell by Adam Brown).

Topic–Comment in Singapore English

‘As for filters wise, get a UV filter if you wish to protect your lens’ (DP Review, retrieved 22 November 2007).

On reading this, I suspected the poster was Singaporean; this was confirmed by a click on her/his profile. Why? Because the sentence structure — namely topic–comment — is characteristically Singaporean.

A topic–comment sentence is one where the speaker/writer starts off by explicitly naming the topic of the sentence, and then adds a comment to it. In the above example, the sentence topic is filters.

What is interesting is that, in Singapore English, topics may be marked with Singlish-type particles such as ah and ha, or with English-type markers such as for, as for, regarding, with regards [sic] to, and –wise. Some examples, with topics underlined:

My teacher ah/ha, she always scold us.
As for me, I don’t like swimming.
For teachers, they should always help weaker students more.
Regarding/With regards [sic] to your enquiry, we are still investigating.
Colleagues-wise, I like my new school.

Note that this is similar to varieties of Chinese, which have topic markers such as a, ha and ne. (This appears to be as much an areal as a linguistic feature — languages such as Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Burmese, Japanese and Korean also have topic markers.) The example quoted at the start of this post is fairly unusual, however, in having a doubly marked topic: as for filters wise.

Topic–comment is such a pervasive feature of Singapore English that it extends even to formal writing. One way of checking if a marked topic is non-standard is to move it to the end of the sentence and see whether it makes sense. If it doesn’t, then the marked topic is non-standard (as indicated by *):

For teachers, they should always help weaker students more.
*They should always help weaker students more, for teachers.

By simply removing the marked topic and substituting the resumptive pronoun they with Teachers, we get a Standard English sentence:

Teachers should always help weaker students more.

Topic–comment is not generally regarded as an unmarked (default) structure in English, but it is in fact quite common in colloquial American English. However, there are interesting differences between topic marking in American English and in Singapore English. For one, American English allows topics to be marked with –wise wherever they may be in a sentence, while in Singapore English, the topic is necessarily sentence-initial (i.e. it must begin a sentence). Hence, the following is good in American English but not in Singapore English:

I like my new school, colleagues-wise (AmE/*SgE).

Dressing

‘Banish cultural bias: A woman’s dressing should not be seen as an invitation to harassment’ (Straits Times caption, 15 October 2007).

It may come as a surprise to many Singaporeans that the word dressing, as used above, is typically Singaporean. In Standard English, dressing means, among other things, ‘the act or process of putting on clothes’, ‘a sauce added to a dish/salad’, and ‘material to cover a wound’ (Merriam-Webster).

Often, Singapore English dressing may be replaced with clothes, clothing, dress sense, taste in clothes, etc. Thus, the caption might have read: A woman’s suggestive/revealing/provocative clothes/dress sense should not be seen as….

Henfoon

What do you call this communication device?

If you’re Singaporean or Malaysian, it’s most probably a handphone to you. If you’re British, either a mobile phone or mobile; if American, a cellular phone, cell phone, or simply cell. (And if you’re Russell Crowe or Naomi Campbell, it’s something you hurl at people you don’t like.)

Many ‘posh’ Singaporeans, however, avoid using the term handphone on the grounds that it is i. non-standard (hmm ... whose standard are we talking about, when even the Brits and Americans can’t agree?), or ii. illogical (‘Of course, you hold any phone receiver in your hand!’). So it might be news to them that even the precision-minded Germans call it a Handy (no prizes for guessing the donor language), eschewing the formal, clumsy Mobiltelefon or Handtelefon.

Speaking of which, handphone is commonly pronounced in Singapore as henfoon. I became aware of this only after reading a cartoon by Colin Goh (who, despite spending most of the year in New York City, has an amazing ear for Singlish). Incidentally, I’ve also begun noticing people pronouncing don’t as doon and won’t as woon.

But back to terminology. Whereas we say ‘Henry SMS-ed me last night’ and ‘Jenny will send you an SMS’, the British use text in both instances (verb and noun): ‘Henry texted me last night’, ‘Jenny will send you a text’. This has the advantage of brevity — it’s one syllable, not three. Since we’re so obsessed with making our utterances as compact and efficient as possible, it’s a wonder we haven’t adopted this usage yet.

Excuse Me, Are You A Nigerian?

This excerpt from an article by Samuel Lee (ST Life!, Saturday, March 17, 2007) caught my eye. Interviewing a Nigerian musician wary of his country’s media, Lee was probed whether he was a countryman, prompting him to wonder: Do Singaporeans speak English like Nigerians?

Yes, we do. There is a strong superficial similarity between our accents, and it has to do with intonation — specifically, what are known in Phonetics as level tones and contour tones.

In British and American English, which have contour tones, the ‘tune’ of a speaker is generally fluid, with one pitch blending seamlessly into the next for the most part. It is like the undulating peaks and falls of a mountain range.

In a level-tone language, however, each syllable has its own pitch, largely unaffected by its neighbours’. Hence, the appropriate analogy is steps rather than slopes. Singlish and Singapore English have mostly level tones — this is almost certainly an influence from Chinese (specifically, Hokkien), in which most words have inherent tone. (However, it should be pointed out that Standard Mandarin is more ‘contoured’ than Singapore Mandarin.)

Where does Nigerian English come in, then? Well, some African languages (including, possibly, those spoken in Nigeria) have what is called ‘downdrift’: The speaker utters syllables that are alternately high and low, continuing on a downward slide towards the end of the utterance. Each successive high-low pair is lower in pitch than the last. You can picture this as a downward zigzag (or a rather depressing sales chart!). It is likely that the English spoken in Nigeria and also Ghana inherited this feature in the form of level tones.

So, Nigerian English and Singapore English do sound superficially similar — and that is because they both have level tones.

‘Cher’ and ‘Mee’

In Singapore, pupils often call their teachers ’Cher. And in Chinese- and Singlish-speaking homes, kids often call their mothers Mee (with a rising intonation). Contrast this with English-speaking societies, where mothers are called Mum/Mom, and, in colloquial American English at least, a teacher is Teach.

All this has to do with stress. Not the stress that comes with being a mother or a teacher, of course, but where the stress/accent falls in a word. Because teacher and Mummy are stressed on the first syllable in Western native varieties of English (i.e. British, American, Australian, New Zealand, South African), it is this syllable which is retained when the word is abbreviated. In Singapore the opposite holds true: teacher and Mummy are stressed on the second syllable; hence it is these that survive.