June 30, 2026

What shapes a speaker’s choice to say, ‘Put where?’ instead of ‘Where do I put it?’ This is the central question behind ‘Morphosyntactic Choice in Singapore English: Grammar, Psycholinguistics, and Variation’, a research project funded from 2026 to 2031 and led by Assistant Professor Nick Huang (NUS Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies). Supported by the Ministry of Education Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship, the project investigates how speakers of Singapore English—particularly its colloquial form, Singlish—select between different grammatical constructions in daily conversation.

A key concept in the project is morphosyntactic variation—the idea that speakers can express the same meaning using different grammatical forms. These choices are not arbitrary. Rather, they reflect a complex interplay of grammar, mental processing, and social context. For instance, when someone says, ‘Put where?’ instead of ‘Where do I put it?’, is that simply a casual way of speaking, or do deeper factors like information density, prosody, and syntactic structure influence the choice?

To uncover these patterns, Huang and his team will combine behavioural experiments with large-scale corpus analysis, drawing on naturalistic data—from WhatsApp conversations to internet forums—enhanced through detailed linguistic annotation. The team will also conduct psycholinguistic experiments to test how speakers make real-time decisions about sentence structure, and whether these choices are shaped more by processing constraints, grammatical rules, or sociolinguistic cues. The project will also trace the historical and cross-linguistic influences on Singapore English, comparing it to languages like Mandarin and Malay to better understand how contact between communities has shaped its development.

This project has significant implications for Singapore’s sociolinguistic landscape. By creating an open-access Singapore Language Resource Repository, the team will provide annotated corpora, treebanks, and computational tools that support a wide range of research—from the development of AI models tailored to local language use, to diagnostic benchmarks for cognitive ageing and linguistic change in the population. Ultimately, this project not only deepens our understanding of how Singaporeans use English, but also lays critical groundwork for future innovations in linguistics, language technology, and speech-based diagnostics.