Past tense marking in Singapore English verbs

Abstract

This study is concerned with the occasional lack of verbal past tense marking in Singapore English, which has been described both as evidence for morphological change and as a phonological consequence of final plosive deletion. Based on a corpus of spoken educated Singapore English, it is investigated whether the lack of past tense marking in verbs in a past tense context is due primarily to morphological or phonological factors and whether word frequency influences the rate of past tense marking. The results are interpreted as evidence for a phonological basis of most unmarked verb forms in Singapore English and suggest a shift in the function of the present tense. They further imply that past tense marking in Singapore English varies with sociolinguistic factors.