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Article published In: English World-Wide
Vol. 46:1 (2025) ► pp.93–121

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Treebanks and World Englishes

A Singapore English perspective

ORCiD logo with link | National University of Singapore
 | East China University of Political Science and Law
ORCiD logo with link | National University of Singapore
ORCiD logo with link | National University of Singapore
ORCiD logo with link | National University of Singapore
ORCiD logo with link | National University of Singapore
ORCiD logo with link | National University of Singapore
Published online: 21 March 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.23069.hua
Abstract
Treebanks (parsed corpora) play an important role in linguistic research, but creating high-quality parses can be very labor-intensive. This paper discusses the prospects of creating such parses in the context of New Englishes and what kinds of research insights parses can deliver. We present Singapore English as a case study. We suggest that despite the many contact-derived lexical and grammatical properties of Singapore English, it is quite feasible to apply an off-the-shelf American English parser to generate parses of Singapore English. In addition, we present an exploratory analysis of noun phrases in a Singapore English treebank, to illustrate the potential of parses and treebanks in research on World Englishes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Singapore English
      • 2.1.1Borrowing of content and function words
      • 2.1.2English-origin words with novel uses
      • 2.1.3Borrowing of constructions distinguished by their syntax
    • 2.2Parser software
    • 2.3Applying the Stanford Parser to SgE corpus material
  • 3.Analysis of Stanford Parser performance
    • 3.1Parsing content word borrowings
    • 3.2Parsing grammatical borrowings
      • 3.2.1English-origin words with novel uses
      • 3.2.2Function word borrowings
      • 3.2.3Constructions with only distinctive syntax
    • 3.3Improving parsing accuracies
      • 3.3.1Providing the parser with part of speech tags
      • 3.3.2Training the parser on hand-corrected parses
    • 3.4Interim summary
  • 4.An exploratory analysis of noun phrases in SgE
    • 4.1Data and analysis
    • 4.2Results
    • 4.3Future research directions using parses
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
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