RIGHT PERIPHERAL FRAGMENTS IN COLLOQUIAL SINGAPORE ENGLISH: AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH

Abstract

Right Dislocation (RD) and Predicative Afterthought (PredAT) have been classified as right peripheral fragments as they contain material at their right edge that appears external to the rest of the sentence. While some pragmatic accounts of right peripheral fragments suggest that they are speech errors, I show that RD and PredAT in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) are subject to restrictions in the grammar. RD is island-sensitive and bare predicates are unacceptable in RD and PredAT. Strategies such as sentence-final particles (SFPs) or degree modification are thus necessary for grammatical right peripheral fragments. The island-sensitivity of RD points in favour of a biclausal movement analysis. An analogous biclausal movement account is also proposed for PredAT. I then present two experiments which provide evidence for the unacceptability of right peripheral fragments containing bare adjectives, and the ability of SFP use and degree modification to improve their acceptability. To account for this, I propose that RD and PredAT containing bare predicates violate the Anchoring Conditon (Ritter & Wiltschko, 2005; Tang & Lee, 2000) which requires events and states to be anchored to the utterance (by time) or to another salient reference point. I show that strategies proposed by Yu (2015) to prevent an Anchoring violation in copula-less sentences in CSE, namely SFP use, degree modification, negation and aspectual already, similarly result in grammatical right peripheral fragments. However, contrary to Yu’s (2015) proposal that such strategies anchor copula-less sentences to time, I show that temporal anchoring is unavailable for right peripheral fragments and propose that RD and PredAT are anchored via focus by making reference to a set of alternatives.