THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF CITIZENSHIP IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

This study contributes to the ongoing academic conversations on language and citizenship by examining how the notion of citizenship is discursively constructed in Singapore, and its relationship with how new citizens imagine and position themselves in Singapore society with respect to the material conditions that surround them.

By using an interpretive approach that incorporates methods from linguistic ethnography, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis, this study analyzes a dataset comprising public media texts and interview narratives and observational data from 18 new citizens.

This study analyzes how various signs, such as linguistic patterns, metapragmatic comments, and multimodal resources, come to index citizenship. The study proposes that these signs cluster together and become typified into the field of indexicality (Jaffe, 2016) of the metasign (Gal, 2016) of citizenship. The findings show that the new citizens’ perspective can help us understand how dominant discourses on citizenship are circulated and reproduced in Singapore society.