The sia particle in Singapore Colloquial English : how it is used by ethnically Singaporean Chinese and Malays in textual conversations

• Main Author: Wong, Jamie Wan Ting
• Other Authors: Werner Botha
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/76542
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper discusses the use of the sia particle in Singapore Colloquial English which is believed to be underexplored in research. It aims to investigate particularly into its extended functions, collocations and variants observed in a collection of naturalistic textual conversations among ethnically Chinese and Malay millennials in Singapore, as well as to identify the varying patterns between a speaker’s uses of the particle with an interlocutor of the same or different ethnicity. Despite how sia is postulated to have originated from the Malay language, the Chinese were found to be more active sia users, providing clues to their more expressive speech patterns and ways of thinking from the Malays. One other key finding here is that the adoption of sia as an emotive particle and its collocation ya sia have served as the two strongest indicators in revealing differences of the particle usage between subjects from the two ethnic groups. Nonetheless, the analysis of the corpus data has illustrated sia as a nearly ubiquitous feature among Singaporean millennials’ conversations, suggesting a degree of internalisation and fluidity of its use and how the millennials are continuously finding new ways to express themselves.