Research projects
Native English in multilingual settings (Habilitation project)
The typology of World Englishes has so far been concerned with individual 'varieties' of English, defined, more often than not, along the lines of the nation-state, as exemplified in terms such as 'Singapore English', 'Indian English', 'British English', and so forth. Typological approaches have included (Bolton 2003) feature-based analyses (Kortmann & Schneider 2008), geographically and socio-historically oriented approaches (Strevens 1992), as well as more sociolinguistic ones (Kachru 1982). All of these, however, retain the sometimes ill-defined unit 'variety' as their object of investigation. The use of recent research in the field of indexicality (Silverstein 2003, Eckert 2008) should enable a more fine-grained, interactional-linguistic analysis of World Englishes, taking speakers' use of English, in its various forms, and in its interplay with other languages, as the starting point for typological classification.
Imperfectives in Indian Singapore English
A joint projcet with Lavanya Sankaran (QMUL), focussing on the use of -ing-constructions in Singapore English, with special emphasis on how the Indian community uses it. Preliminary results from fieldwork carried out in 2011 suggests that Indians (Tamil speakers) are more likely to judge as grammatical non-delimited habituals inflected with -ing than the other ethnic groups. Ongoing research is trying to capture this in more detail, with a larger sample.
Output: one poster at ISLE 2011 in Boston, one book chapter in preparation.
Variation in Singapore English
My DPhil project, which I never fully left behind. I'm interested in the way language variation (both between English and Singlish but also between the various official and non-official languages) in Singapore is dealt with, in terms of language planning and policy, linguistic landscaping, language attitudes, and generally in how the various groups of speakers interact in daily life.
Output: DPhil thesis, two peer-reviewed articles to date; see publications for more details.
Indexicality and authenticity
A topic that grew out of the DPhil research, and which I've recently become more interested in. I'm curious about how linguistic variation (in its traditional sense) can be used as a resource in 'creating' (ie indexing) authenticity, and how this ostensible authenticity is perceived in interaction. Implementing this in multilingual settings is an additional challenging area I want to venture into.
Output: a conference on 'Indexing authenticity', with an edited volume containing its papers.