A Nanosyntactic approach to sentence-final particles in Singlish: A cartographic perspective

Abstract

Cartography has provided evidence for the expansion of the CP domain, and many of the functional heads identified within the newly identified structure appear to correspond with the semantic/pragmatic functions of Colloquial Singaporean English sentence-final particles, suggesting that the functional heads are themselves the building blocks which comprise these particles. As Lim (2007) and Wong (2004) identify many CSE SFPs as originating from Cantonese, I turn to Sybesma and Li’s (2007) decompositional analysis of Cantonese particles, and demonstrate that the proposed structure is able to account for the pragmatic and semantic contributions of the 25 distinct CSE SFPs I have identified, while also accurately predicting both the availability of stacking of any combination of SFPs, and their relative order if available. However, the operations of Movehead, Movephrase, and Adjoin that are available for SFP formation within conventional minimalist literature cannot derive the right surface forms of the CSE SFPs as they require that the SFPs be demonstrably dissectable. I therefore adopt a nanosyntactic approach,which proposes that lexical items correspond to syntactic subtrees, and demonstrate that this approach adequately maintains the SFP system proposed in CSE.