Department of Linguistics

Media, mobility, and change in Singapore English

Rebecca Lurie Starr (National University of Singapore)

3:30PM November 19 2020 Thursday on zoom

Recent scholarship in world Englishes has advocated for a shift away from lectal continuum models to a feature-focused, variationist approach, in which speakers make use of linguistic resources to index a range of social meanings. This framework is particularly useful in cosmopolitan contexts such as the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore, in which transnational mobility and exposure to international media have resulted in a broadening of individual repertoires and the diversification of the linguistic landscape beyond a dichotomous opposition between local and external English norms. In this talk, I survey some of my recent work on variation and change in Singapore English, from both perception and production perspectives, and highlight the multiple roles played by transnational mobility and media consumption in shaping the trajectory of change in this community.

Bio:

Dr. Rebecca Lurie Starr is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2012. Her research, which focuses on acquisition of sociolinguistic variation and language variation and change in multilingual contexts, has been published in journals including Language in Society, World Englishes, Language Variation and Change, Journal of English Linguistics, and Journal of Chinese Linguistics.

https://hku.zoom.us/j/98447469618?pwd=dUNXOTlhakhHcDA4ajZTYWp1RGpXZz09

Meeting ID: 984 4746 9618
Password: 556927