I chanced across a paper, called “A conversation-analytic - TopicsExpress



          

I chanced across a paper, called “A conversation-analytic approach to the ‘sia’ particle in Singapore Colloquial English”, by Velda Khoo. I especially enjoyed the conversation samples she featured. As a playwright, its a delight to see an academic faithfully transcribing how people speak: Eg 1: ANDY: I always want to be the Hong Kong CID one. LUCAS: Wah you serious is it! ANDY: I watch the wu jian dao (Infernal Affairs), wah lao I want to learn. MATT: Hong Kong CID sia! Eg 2: A: He already returned me the scanned copy, but I couldn’t find the hard copy lor. B: Maybe someone stole your assignment! A: For what sia? B: How I know, maybe someone wanted to see your zai (superb) assignment. Eg 3: C: They got salt, bro. D: Go and take! E: I lazy sia. ***** The paper proposes that ‘sia’ is derived from the Malay ‘sial’. I found the following hilarious, because of the self-deprecating self-stereotyping that the Malay undergrads engaged in: ‘Sial’, according to Singaporean Malay speakers, means ‘bad luck’ and functions like a curse, something like ‘damn’ in English. When asked to provide an example of how they use sial ah, a couple of male Malay-speaking undergraduates gave these sentences: EG5-A Sial ah kau. Kenapa kau habiskan semua Koko Krunch? ‘Damn you. Why did you finish all the Koko Krunch (a type of breakfast cereal)?’ EG 5-B Sial ah, cikgu tu bosan gila. ‘Damn, that teacher is really boring.’ EG 5-C Wah sial ah kau dapat pergi politeknik? ‘Oh wow you managed to enter a polytechnic?’ ***** And this is one of the conclusions: If we accept that sia in Singapore Colloquial English carries the same kind of negative connotations as sial does in the Malay language, we can give an explanation to why sia as a particle can be easily used by the speaker to mark a certain relationship with his interlocutors. The use of sia to someone who does not know you will result in you being seen as someone uncouth and uneducated, and thus, sia is used only within the ‘in-group’, and has subsequently taken on that function of marking the people who belong to it. This ‘in-group’, for the most part, will consist of people closest to the speaker that he can identify with, his ‘bros’, a unique relationship of friends close enough to be thought of like family. From the data, we see that sia occurs together with speech that is peppered with swearing and colloquial terms - this relaxed level of speech and relatively intimate topics that are talked about signal the ‘closeness’ of the participants. Their identities become salient in the words they choose to use, with sia also being one of these words. Out of these environments, the use of sia would probably decrease, or even disappear altogether.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 15:51:34 +0000

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