Aspects of the Experiential ‘Ever’ in Colloquial Singapore English

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) is well- known to have an aspectual system heavily influenced by substratum languages (of the Sinitic and Malay varieties) – while significant research has been conducted into the completive perfective ‘already’ and the emphatic perfectives ‘finish’ and ‘got’ (Bao, 2005), the experiential marker ‘ever’ meaning ‘at least once’ has been far less discussed. In this study, native CSE speaker interpretations of sentences containing experiential ‘ever’ were compared against native Standard English speaker intuitions of the same sentences. This study had two main goals. 1. Given that CSE draws from substratum languages which lack articles, this study sought to look at the influence different determiners have over the interpretation of a sentence, where 3 different levels of interpretation were given: “super-type”, “sub-type”, and token (e.g ‘this type of food (pasta)’, ‘this type of pasta (penne)’, and ‘this specific piece of pasta’). Hence, the interpretations of sentences containing the null determiner, indefinite article ‘a’, definite article ‘the’, and demonstrative ‘this’ were compared. Preliminary data indicated that the definite article and demonstrative produced substantial interpretative inconsistency for both native CSE speakers and native Standard English speakers, with a split preference between “sub-type” and token interpretations. The null determiner and indefinite article produced consistent “super- type” interpretations for both native CSE speakers and native Standard English speakers. Hence, it appears that interpretations are sensitive to definiteness in a way that is not predictable from substrate input. 2. Secondly, Ziegeler (2015) discusses the plausibility of the experiential ‘ever’ having arisen through universal grammaticalisation pathways or source-language replica grammaticalisation (Heine and Kuteva, 2005), where CSE may have drawn from an earlier stage of Standard English with a similarly experiential use of ‘ever’. By presenting historical corpus evidence, she argues that such replica grammaticalisation is impossible given few attestations of such a usage. This study hence seeks to corroborate this finding with implicit evidence from contemporary Standard English speakers by showing that they lack access to this proposed earlier use by assessing their interpretive intuitions. Here, preliminary data showed a tendency for native Standard English speakers to interpret ‘ever’ as the habitual aspect, whereas native CSE speakers consistently produced the expected minimal experiential aspect “at least once.” We acknowledge however that such evidence is largely circumstantial as we cannot assume speakers’ access to the history of their own language. Given that Sinitic and Malay substrates likewise do not provide suitable relexification sources, nor is there a clearly applicable universal grammaticalisation pathway (Ho and Wong, 2001), the origin of ‘ever’ in CSE hence remains largely debatable and an area for future research.