The aspectual system of Singapore English and the systemic substratist explanation

Singapore English is a contact language with a constant linguistic substratum and superstratum. It lends itself to an interesting case study on how linguistic neologisms emerge out of a pool of competing features from the typologically distinct languages active in the contact ecology. This paper investigates the aspectual system of Singapore English and that of Chinese, the main substrate language, and of English, the lexical-source language. Despite the presence of competing aspectual categories from the two languages, the aspectual system of Singapore English is essentially the Chinese system filtered through the morphosyntax of English. Substrate influence is systemic, and the competing grammatical subsystems do not mix. The aspectual system of Singapore English, a contact language with a constant linguistic ecology, is markedly different from that of English, the lexicalsource language. Although strikingly similar to the aspectual system of Chinese, the main substrate language, it is nevertheless not point-by-point identical to the Chinese system. A few aspectual categories that exist in the Chinese system are curiously missing in the Singapore English system. In this paper I present an analysis of the latter system and show that the partial convergence between Singapore English and Chinese in aspectual system results from the interaction of two intuitively simple constraints. First, substrate transfer in an ecology with a constant and active substratum involves an entire grammatical subsystem; secondly, the morphosyntactic exponence of the transferred system must meet the grammaticality requirements of the lexical-source language. The lexical-source language acts like a filter, sifting out those categories of the transferred subsystem for which its grammar