On the interaction of past tense and potentiality in Singaporean Colloquial English

Abstract

It was observed in earlier studies on Singaporean English (e.g. Ho and Platt, 1993) that the past tense was used in marking present as well as past habitual aspect. Ho and Platt’s main thesis had proposed that the use of past tense in Singaporean (Colloquial) English was as a marker of lexical perfectivity rather than tense, and that, phonetic factors aside, the lexical aspect of the verb itself determined whether or not the past tense would be used at all to mark past time reference. The use of already as a marker of both perfect aspect and grammatical perfectivity, equivalent in function to Mandarin Chinese le, has also been observed by Bao (1995, 2005), and it is questioned to what extent such forms are in competition with one another. Little attention, however, has been afforded to the study of past tense in non-past environments in Singaporean (Colloquial) English, including those that may be considered to be, in some accounts, grammatically imperfective in terms of aspect marking, and ambivalent in terms of realis or irrealis marking. The present study isolates the use of past tense in marking future anteriority in realis conditional clauses and their semantic equivalents (where it is used to mark not only lexical perfectivity but grammatical perfectivity as well), in marking present habitual aspect, in expressing future plans, and in performative uses. It is questioned why the past tense can share with already some of its functions of marking grammatical perfectivity (but with non-past time reference), and why such perfective environments that can support a strongly realis function in a contact dialect are correspondingly situations for generating meanings of potentiality and irrealis in standard usage. The study also compares such uses with the distribution of the positive-declarative, periphrastic do-auxiliary in the history of English, a form that was claimed to function as a perfective marker in Middle and Early Modern English (Denison, 1993; Ziegeler, 2006). Many such uses were found in similar environments to those in which the non-temporal past tense is found in Singaporean Colloquial English.