The Systemic Nature of Substratum Transfer

This chapter discusses four grammatical systems in Singapore English that are transferred from Chinese: aspect, pragmatic particles, topicalization, and quantification. Proper analysis of the relevant substrate features reveals extensive clustering: features which form a grammatical system transfer together. Substratum transfer targets the grammatical system, and the transferred system is then exponenced with suitable morphosyntactic materials from the lexifier, filtering out those component features for which the lexifier has no well-formed morphosyntactic exponent. The analysis of the four systems shows that post-transfer stabilization is subject to the normative effect of English. It is argued that data obtained through introspection and corpora are complementary, and substrate-induced grammatical change is best accounted for in a usage-based model that uses the two types of data.