From Murakami’s simple egg salad sandwiches in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to the apples in Orwell’s Animal Farm, food has long served as a powerful metaphor and metonymy in literary fiction. In ‘Metaphors and Metonymies of Food in Four Asian Texts’ (Anthropocene Ecologies of Food, 2022), Associate Professor Chitra Sankaran (NUS English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies) explores how four Asian works — Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, Vida Cruz’s Song of the Mango, Michele Cruz Skinner’s Mango Season, and Wayne Ree’s Satay — use food to highlight the identities of the people and their communities.  These four contemporary texts from India, Singapore, and the Philippines  explore the making and eating of food, as a reflection of the diverse cultural connotations surrounding nourishment. In Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, the dietary habits of Indians and Americans are contrasted, offering insights into the cultural significance of food in these societies. On the other hand, Cruz and Skinner, centre their narratives on a fruit, the mango, but diverge in their approaches. While Cruz weaves a mythical tale of warring clans over a mango tree, Skinner presents a family drama in Mango Season, showcasing how the mango is deeply embedded in both cultures’ histories. Ree’s Satay is …

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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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