Slang-induced lexical units in Singlish SMS (based on the NUS SMS corpus)

Abstract

The role of slang in modern English is highly controversial since the purpose of its use is rarely a simple exchange of information. Slang serves more as an identification of a social group; its functioning is a linguistic reflection of the modernity, which comes down to the changing of a certain discourse towards informal speech. The article is devoted to the study of slang in the Colloquial Singapore English. SMS of 2004 and 2012 from the NUS SMS corpus were used as the material for the study. The NUS SMS is the corpus developed by the linguists from the National University of Singapore. The purpose of this article is to observe the use of slang and its role in SMS. This study presents a corpus-driven approach where the statistical data analysis was used. As a result, it was found that the words which are commonly referred to slang originated from the Chinese and performing pragmatic functions of addressing and expressing the authors’ emotional state are widely used in SMS of 2004 and 2012 from the NUS SMS corpus.

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