Lor in colloquial Singapore English

Abstract

Colloquial Singapore English contains a number of pragmatic particles. This paper focuses on the particle lor. Previous analyses have suggested either that it marks a piece of information as being obvious, or that it indicates that an utterance has the pragmatic force of a 'weak' suggestion. In this paper, I show that examples of the latter are better analysed with lor as expressing a sense of resignation. I then show how, by adopting a grammaticalization-based approach, the resignation sense of lor can be related to its use as a marker of 'obviousness' © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.