新加坡华语词汇“没有”之来源与语义研究 = RESEARCH ON THE ORIGIN AND SEMANTICS OF THE LEXICON "MEIYOU" IN SINGAPOREAN MANDARIN

Abstract

Based on the author's experience in Singapore's language environment, it has been observed that spoken Mandarin used in Singapore is often unique, such that one can observe tinges of other spoken languages mixed within the language. This paper aims to find out the origins, semantics and usage of one particular word that is commonly used as the sentence initial in spoken Mandarin in Singapore -meiyou. The corpus of this research is made up of 60 dialogues involving 66 instances of meiyou provided by 6 informants which contributed to the main materials, and 2 other forms of supplementary materials regarding the semantics and usage of meiyou. Through comparisons between the main materials and the supplementary ones, and by using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to develop the semantics of meiyou, the author aims to uncover how the usage and semantics of meiyou in Singaporean Mandarin coincides with that of Standard Chinese, Chinese dialects and even Singlish.