대한언어학회 전자저널

Kim, Chonghyuck & Wong, Zechy. (2015). On the Distribution of Ownself in Singapore English. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal 23(4), 45-62. Singapore English, a variety of English born out of intense contact with other local languages, has a unique self-expression in its lexicon - ownself. This self-expression displays partial convergence with its believed source, Chinese ziji: Like ziji, ownself can appear in a non-argument position, where it performs all of zijis emphatic functions. Unlike ziji, however, ownself cannot appear in an argument position. This partial convergence presents an apparent problem for substratist theories of creole genesis in contact linguistics (e.g. Lefebvre 1998; Bao 2005), because the theories predict full syntactic and semantic convergence between ownself and ziji. In this article, we resolve this problem by analysing the peculiar distribution of ownself as a consequence of grammatical competition between lexical items with overlapping distributions; ownself enters into competition with other self-expressions (e.g., himself) in argument position, and loses out in the process. In recent years, competition has been claimed to play a key role in the creation of new grammatical features in contact situations (Mufwene 2003, 2005; Aboh 2009), but the mechanics of such competition have largely remained elusive. Our analysis, to the extent that it is successful, can be construed as one specific way in which competition influences the creation of a new linguistic feature.

# reflexives # ownself # ziji # Creole # Singapore English

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