Doctoral Dissertation Research: The semiotics and social practices of constructing a "proper" Singaporean identity

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed dissertation research investigates how "proper" language identities are enacted in Singapore, a discussion situated within broader sociopolitical discourse of global citizenship and local ways of being. This study treats the practices of a "proper" identity as constitutive of a semiotic package or repertoire - a fluid set of semiotic resources which people must balance to enact appropriate levels of "globalness" and "localness" in Singapore. Linguistic practices are investigated through variation in Singapore English (SgE), a complex linguistic repertoire encompassing Singlish, the most local and colloquial English, and Standard Singapore English (SSE), which typically indicates higher education and being extra-local. Twenty Singaporeans will be recruited for ethnographic participant observation and recorded in various conversational contexts ranging from formal interviews to casual social gatherings. Casual settings will elicit the use of Singlish, which most basically differs from SSE via the incorporation of Chinese discourse particles and syntax. Contrastively, SSE is used in formal settings. The varied use of SgE across conversational contexts reveals not only intra-speaker variation but also a speaker's underlying beliefs about language and how it should be used. The sociophonetic aspect of this research project focuses on variation in voice onset time (VOT), an acoustic measure used to categorize stop consonants, like the difference between /p/ and /b/. Fifty Singaporeans will participate in a series of speech perception tasks testing how SgE stops are categorically perceived. These tasks will provide a sociophonetic profile of VOT in SgE as well as investigating whether VOT contributes to the perception of a speaker's social identity as an acoustic cue. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this work identifies patterns of variation in the production and perception of SgE, paying attention to processes through which variables and practices come to be associated with global mobility or local rootedness. This study will also contribute to existing SgE documentation in providing a sociophonetic account of VOT. Finally, exploring micro- and macro-variation in SgE sheds light on broader issues of language in globalization, post-colonial sociolinguistics, and New Englishes.