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On agreement-drop in Singlish: topics never agree

Paper · 2022 · Si Kai Lee

Summary

Singlish, the colloquial contact variety of English spoken in Singapore, often leaves third-person singular present-tense verbs without -s. Earlier accounts (Wee & Ansaldo 2004; Sato 2014) saw this as free variation in the post-syntax, where a zero allomorph is chosen instead of -s. On that view, dropping -s should have no syntactic or semantic consequences.

Lee tests this prediction with minimal pairs that differ only in whether -s appears, judged by seven native speakers. For most of them, the bare-verb clauses behave differently. They:

  • disallow object topicalisation,
  • block extraction of lower adjuncts,
  • lose inverse scope,
  • cannot be embedded under regret-type predicates,
  • reject universally quantified "subjects",
  • allow only D-linked readings of wh-"subjects".

These properties match topicalisation across languages. The paper therefore proposes that agreement-drop clauses use an alternative clausal spine with an obligatory Topic projection, so the overt "subject" is really a topic. This bundle of traits is traced to Sinitic syntax. The work matters because it shows that an apparently cosmetic missing morpheme can mark a distinct structure.

Key points

  • Of seven consultants, five showed every contrast between agreeing and agreement-drop clauses. Two showed none, which the author reads as a possible split in the speech community.
  • Two prosodic and phonological explanations were tested and rejected for the topicalisation contrast:
    • adding a comma-style intonation break does not rescue a topicalised object with a bare verb;
    • adding material at the right edge (e.g. "well") does not rescue it either.
  • Mismatched agreement between the matrix and embedded clause is itself acceptable, so the topicalisation contrast is not caused by the mismatch.
  • Out of context, a bare simplex clause like "Mr. Wu know Mary" feels incomplete. Rich discourse context or the particles meh and one remove this effect, so it is pragmatic rather than structural.
  • Agreement-drop "subjects" are read as specific. Existential ones can take exceptionally wide scope.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Vary exactly one morpheme and keep every other clause identical, even if that leaves somewhat marked agreement mismatches, so any effect can be pinned to the single change.
  • I2. Before claiming a structural effect, rule out prosodic and phonological explanations with targeted variants.
  • I3. A missing agreement suffix can signal that the preverbal noun is a specific topic rather than an ordinary subject.
  • I4. The paper separates "feels incomplete without context" from "ungrammatical", showing the former disappears once a question under discussion is supplied.
  • I5. Disagreement among judges is treated as possible evidence of distinct grammars, not as noise.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): build evaluation pairs that flip one feature only, as negative controls showing which cue a parser or reader actually relies on.
  • I2 (learn): when a self-induced repair rule seems to fix errors, test simpler surface explanations (punctuation, token position) before accepting the rule.
  • I3 (frames): when processing nonstandard English, treat a bare verb with a third-person-singular noun as a hint of topic status and specificity, which helps coreference and the choice of frame roles.
  • I4 (answer): readers could mark such sentences as context-dependent and search the surrounding discourse for the open question, instead of judging them broken.
  • I5 (learn): when witness parsers systematically disagree on dialect input, keep the variants as separate dialect hypotheses rather than forcing a single silver label.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of ConnecticutStorrs · United States13 works · 357 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 523 worksNeuroscience · 186 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 185 works

Cite

Cite as Si Kai Lee. 2022. On agreement-drop in Singlish: topics never agree. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.7679

@article{lee2022agreement,
  title = {{On agreement-drop in Singlish: topics never agree}},
  author = {Si Kai Lee},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.7679},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.7679}
}

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