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Constraints on substrate transfer revisited1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2012

JEFF SIEGEL
JEFF SIEGEL*
Affiliation:
University of New England (Australia) & Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
*
Author's address: School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australiajsiegel@une.edu.au
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Extract

In an article in this journal, Bao (2005) proposes a constraint on functional transfer that he claims accounts for features of colloquial Singapore English (and other language contact varieties) better than the congruence constraint proposed by Siegel (1999) and subsequently developed in later works (e.g. Siegel 2003, 2008a). More specifically, Bao argues that the requirement of surface syntactic similarity for transfer is too strong. His analysis uses Mandarin to exemplify the Chinese substrate languages that were the source of transfer, following the view that there is a universal Chinese grammar (Chao 1968: 13). However, the present article shows that Bao's claim is unjustified because the actual source of transfer was a variety of Chinese that differs significantly from Mandarin in the area of grammar he examined.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , July 2012 , pp. 473 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

[1]

I would like to thank Vicki Knox and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

References

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