Analysis of the Frequency of Occurrence of Colloquial Singapore English in the International Corpus of English – Singapore

Abstract

[eng] This paper examines the frequency of occurrence of Colloquial Singapore English in the International Corpus of English – Singapore. To conduct this study, five specific verbs (STAY, TAKE, BRING, KEEP, SEND) are analyzed taking into consideration various features of this English variety: Semantics (these verbs have acquired different meanings from Standard English), inflectional morphology (omission of -s for the third person singular and past form for the past simple) and periphrastic forms (omission of the auxiliary verbs BE and HAVE for the continuous and perfect forms respectively). In total, I analyze these verbs in 3054 different contexts retrieved from the corpus. As far as semantics are concerned in almost a 10% of the results, that cover the Private Dialogues section of the corpus, the verbs portray characteristics of Colloquial Singapore English, and the results for inflectional morphology and periphrastic forms vary greatly due to the more reduced amount of dataset. However, I obtain significative results which confirm the presence of this non-standard variety in the corpus which is higher in the spoken section than in the written one, in which I do not find results at all.