{"id":82,"date":"2018-02-11T06:48:15","date_gmt":"2018-02-11T06:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/?page_id=82"},"modified":"2018-02-11T06:51:44","modified_gmt":"2018-02-11T06:51:44","slug":"erlewine","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/program\/erlewine\/","title":{"rendered":"A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish <em>already<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine<br \/>\n(National University of Singapore)<\/p>\n<p>In this talk, I discuss the synchronic syntax\/semantics of sentence-final <i class=\"\">already<\/i> in Singlish (also: Colloquial Singapore English), a contact language with significant Chinese substrate influence, and implications for the nature of the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC) (Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts 2014, a.o.) and Spell-Out. I begin by largely adopting and refining Bao&#8217;s (2005) proposal that\u00a0<i class=\"\">already<\/i>\u00a0is the result of a relexification process (Lefebvre 1998) in the development of Singlish, pairing the syntax\/semantics of the Chinese sentence-final article <i class=\"\">le\/liao\/laa<\/i>\u00a0with the English surface form \u201calready.\u201d I then show that the semantic scope of Singlish <em class=\"\">already<\/em> shows that it unambiguously attaches high to its host clause, above TP (Cheong 2016), whereas Chinese cognate particles\u00a0<em class=\"\">le\/liao\/laa<\/em>\u00a0unambiguously attach clause-medially, between VP and TP (Erlewine 2017). This situation leaves us with a puzzle: Why is Singlish <i class=\"\">already <\/i>at the clause edge, unlike its substrate cognate <i class=\"\">le\/liao\/laa<\/i>? (Note that, due to its sentence-final position, word order is uninformative or at least under-informative for the language learner.) I propose that this discrepancy in height is explained by an interaction between the Final-over-Final Constraint, enforced over Spell-Out domains (Erlewine 2017), and verbal inflection suspending Spell-Out at <i class=\"\">v<\/i>P in Singlish but not Chinese languages.<\/p>\n<p><strong>References<\/strong><br \/>\nBao, Zhiming. 2005. The aspectual system of Singapore English and the systemic substratist explanation. Journal of Linguistics 41:237\u2013267.<br \/>\nBiberauer, Theresa, Anders Holmberg, and Ian Roberts. 2014. A syntactic universal and its consequences. Linguistic Inquiry 45:169\u2013225.<br \/>\nCheong, Phoebe. 2016. Sentence-final <em>already<\/em> and <em>only<\/em> in Singapore English. BA Honors thesis, National University of Singapore.<br \/>\nErlewine, Michael Yoshitaka. 2017. Low sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese and the Final-over-Final Constraint. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 26:37\u201375.<br \/>\nLefebvre, Claire. 1998. Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar: The case of Haitian creole. Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore) In this talk, I discuss the synchronic syntax\/semantics of sentence-final already in Singlish (also: Colloquial Singapore English), a contact language with significant Chinese substrate influence, and implications for the nature of the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC) (Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts 2014, a.o.) and Spell-Out. I begin by largely adopting &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/program\/erlewine\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish <em>already<\/em><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":27,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-82","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9qjuD-1k","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86,"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/82\/revisions\/86"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lingconf.com\/compsyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}