Lexical Borrowing in Malaysian English: Influences of Malay

How different are the monophthongs of Malay speakers of Malaysian and Singapore English?

Early works on Singapore and Malaysian English used to consider them as a single homogeneous entity based on their shared history as previous British colonies. However, since 1965, both Malaysia and Singapore have been independent from each other. It is interesting to investigate, some four decades post-independence, how different the English speech patterns of Malaysians and Singaporeans have ...

Constraint-Based Models of Lexical Borrowing

Linguistic borrowing is the phenomenon of transferring linguistic constructions (lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic) from a “donor” language to a “recipient” language as a result of contacts between communities speaking different languages. Borrowed words are found in all languages, and—in contrast to cognate relationships—borrowing relationships may exist across unrelated lang...

Attitudes towards lexical borrowing and intra-sentential code-switching among Spanish-English bilinguals*

The present study seeks to evaluate bilinguals’ attitudes towards the contact forms that are manifested in the speech of Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States, and the factors that contribute to this linguistic assessment. Towards that end, bilinguals of diverse proficiencies are presented with five versions of the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood/La Caperucita Roja: a normative Spani...

Lexical Cohesion in English and Persian Abstracts

This study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in English and Persian abstracts of Iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. For this purpose, one hundred English and Persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on Seddigh and Yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Halli...

Collocations in Singaporean - Malaysian English