Since its inception in 1988, the International Corpus of English (ICE) has been a cornerstone for research on World Englishes, comprising 14 countries’ corpora from both the Inner Circle countries like Britain and the US to the Outer Circle countries like Singapore and the Philippines. Grammatically annotating the ICE corpora is a tall order due to limited resources and the need for human oversight. Part-of-speech (PoS) taggers, which are tools used to add linguistically relevant features like phonological and lexical annotation. For example, ‘table’ is labelled by the tag, ‘noun’. Modern PoS taggers are trained on data from Inner Circle English and can be used as cost-effective tools to tag Outer Circle English, though with lower accuracy. Regardless, their relatively high performance still makes it easier to check and correct the automatic tagging, easing what would otherwise be an extremely labour-intensive process. These corrected texts can then be used as a benchmark to improve PoS taggers, in turn making them more effective for processing Outer Circle English materials.  In ‘Tagging Singapore English’ (World Englishes, 2022), Bao et al. (NUS English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies) explored using the Stanford PoS tagger, trained on standard American English, to tag the Singaporean component …

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At the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic, when wide-scale measures such as social distancing, lockdowns, and home quarantine orders were implemented, migrant workers (MW) were seemingly sidelined, with many lacking access to the robust national healthcare system or medical assistance. The arrival of the second wave of COVID-19 transmissions in 2020 cast a spotlight on the plight of the MW population, drawing criticism from both the media and the public.  In “Restoration of positive self-image: Ideological circles in the mediatization of government-migrant worker relations during Covid 19” (Discourse & Communication, 2023), Associate Professor Michelle M. Lazar (NUS English Language & Linguistics), Dr Aaron Tham (University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia), and Wesley Wang (Oxford University, UK) examines how The Straits Times (ST), the national newspaper known for its pro-government stance, framed government-MW relations during the second wave of COVID-19 transmission to reconstruct a positive self-image amid widespread negative publicity.  Using van Dijk’s (2011) ideological square framework, which emphasises ‘positive self-representation’ and ‘negative other-presentation,’ the authors found that ST selectively highlighted news stories showcasing the Singapore government’s attentiveness to the vulnerable migrant worker (MW) community during the COVID-19 outbreak in their dormitories. The coverage focused on the Singapore government’s responsive …

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In 19th century Singapore, a unique creole emerged among the Straits-born Peranakan community. Descendants of early Chinese traders who married local Malay women were referred to as Peranakans, with males known as Babas and females Nyonyas. The Peranakans settled largely in coastal Malacca and Singapore, developing a hybrid culture which they expressed through Baba Malay, a now endangered creole consisting of a Malay-based vocabulary and Hokkien sentence structures.   In the article “The Early Baba Malay Continuum” (Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2023), Associate Professor Nala H. Lee (NUS English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies) challenges the notion of Baba Malay as a static language defined by a fixed set of linguistic features. She illustrates the range of variation present in Baba Malay through an exploration of works from the late 1800s and early 1900s, which reveals the existence of a Baba Malay creole continuum during this period. The creole continuum is conventionally perceived as a range of different registers of a language which lay between two extremes — the basilectal (the most prestigious variety on the continuum) and acrolectal (the least prestigious variety on the continuum) poles. This understanding of a continuum can be problematic due to its inherent basilect-acrolect …

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