An in-depth study of discourse particles in Singapore English

Abstract

This study is an in-depth study of the discourse particles (e.g. 'meh', 'lah', 'hor') in Singapore English. Within the field of a recently developed pragmatic theory of communication, relevance theory, there has been much interest in how discourse particle phenomena in utterances may be articulated (Blass 1990; Blakemore 1987, 2000, 2002). Specifically, these are linguistic expressions that facilitate processing at the inferential stage of utterance interpretation. My research situates itself alongside this growing interest and considers the analysis of discourse particles from a cognitive viewpoint. Using naturally occurring data, this study offers some reflections on how relevance theory can be a tool in describing more systematically the nature of particles as interpreted in discourse. The study proposes unified meanings of 'meh', 'hor' and 'lah', explains how the functions of the particles follow from the unified meanings, and makes predictions about ill-formed constructions.