EXPLORING CHANGES IN ENGLISH NEWS WRITING IN SINGAPORE - A DIACHRONIC CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

This dissertation investigates changes in contemporary written English in Singapore from 1993 to 2016. It is based on a Singapore English Newspaper (SEN) corpus compiled from local news articles at three temporal points and focuses mainly on grammar. One of the first diachronic studies in Singapore English (SgE), this thesis also explores corresponding data from the diachronic Siena-Bologna news corpus. As SgE is in the endonormative stabilisation phase in Schneider’s (2007) model of postcolonial Englishes, divergence from British English (BrE) is to be expected. The results reveal changes in grammatical preferences in SEN over the given period, many of which occur in a similar pattern as those identified in BrE, albeit at varying rates of change. Other changes display properties independent of those in BrE. Not only does this thesis add to our understanding of the evolutionary status of SgE vis-à-vis BrE, it also surfaces implications for development of an endonormative standard.