Singlish particles and politeness work in face-threatening speech acts

ABSTRACT

Having been thought to be ‘crass’, ‘uneducated’ and ‘unintelligent’, Singlish, also commonly known as Singapore Colloquial English, is perceived to be an impolite language. In particular, Singlish particles, which are purportedly Singlish’s most distinctive feature, have been said to exacerbate threats to addressees’ negative and positive face. However, existing literature has found that in informal speech settings, Singlish may actually be beneficial for politeness, mainly by virtue of its status as a language of solidarity. This article seeks to explore the relationship between Singlish particles and politeness, by investigating the use of particles within two types of inherently face-threatening speech acts – assertions and directives – and how these particles boost politeness by mitigating the face threats present in these speech acts. Our analysis of 72 hours of conversational data suggests that Singlish particles hold much potential to help speakers appeal to their addressees’ positive face needs in informal settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Singlish
• pragmatic particles
• politeness
• solidarity
• Singapore

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Impoliteness’ here refers to the exacerbation of face threats in terms of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory, rather than to the notion of ‘impoliteness’ (e.g. Culpeper, 1996; Haugh, 2015), which often refers to how linguistic features, including conventionalized impolite formulae (Culpeper, 2010), are intentionally used to cause disharmony.

2. There were also contexts where particles appeared to serve no overt polite functions, instead serving generic functions such as question markers at the end of interrogative statements, exclamations or expressions of emotions (especially surprised), and general fillers in between utterances. For these reasons, ah²¹, huh²⁴, huh²¹, leh⁵⁵ and eh⁵⁵ were omitted from the analysis; instances of ah²⁴, lah⁵¹, sia²⁴, hor²⁴ and eh²¹ falling under these categories were also omitted.

3. Disapproval is at odds with the positive face needs of the addressee, because positive face is primarily associated with one’s desire to gain the approval of their interlocutor.

4. In the conversational excerpts contained in this article, participants will be known by their conversation code (four-digit number), followed by their participant code (either A or B).

5. In this context, eh⁵⁵ functions as a question marker.

6. An anonymous reviewer had pointed out the possibility of ‘Okay’ being a discourse marker rather than a proposition in this instance. We are of the opinion that the speaker’s use of ‘Okay’ here is not a discourse marker but, rather, a truncated version of ‘it’s okay’ or ‘that’s okay’, which are propositions asserting the speaker’s view that it was acceptable for the addressee to not be sad and hence not cry their heart out at someone’s funeral. This may be supported by how the speaker then echoed this same viewpoint in uttering ‘that’s fine’ twice later. This would further bolster the above argument regarding lah²¹ as an emphatic particle, which served to emphasize the proposition in ‘okay’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education – Singapore [Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (MOE2019-T2-1-084)].