TOWARDS A COMPUTERIZED LEXIS OF SINGAPORE ENGLISH

Abstract

In this age of information technology, the computer serves as an important tool to the study of language. Motivated by this perspective, this Academic Exercise is a descriptive study of the distinctive features characterizing Singapore English lexis based on a computerized corpus. The aims, objectives and an overview of this study are laid down in Chapter 1. The literature related to this study is surveyed and the description of language from a computational perspective is outlined. The issues surrounding the compilation and text processing involved in creating a computerized corpus are found in Chapter 2. Compilation of the corpus involves preparing the corpus in n format suitable for text processing. Once the corpus is prepared, it can then be processed in order to obtain a concordance listing. From this concordance listing, lexical entries are then selected for analysis. The guiding principle for constructing the present lexicon is to assign it a richer role, one that would specify the syntactic and collocational behaviour of the word concerned. A framework for such an analysis is suggested in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4, the specimen lexical entries already(adv), bungalow(n), kampong(n), makan(v), makan(n), schooling(v), and see(v) are analysed to demonstrate the application of the framework described in Chapter 3. Chapter 5 represents the concluding chapter.