Constraints on substrate transfer revisited

In an article in this journal, Bao (2005) proposes a constraint on functional transfer that he claims accounts for features of colloquial Singapore English (and other language contact varieties) better than the congruence constraint proposed by Siegel (1999) and subsequently developed in later works (e.g. Siegel 2003, 2008a). More specifically, Bao argues that the requirement of surface syntactic similarity for transfer is too strong. His analysis uses Mandarin to exemplify the Chinese substrate languages that were the source of transfer, following the view that there is a universal Chinese grammar (Chao 1968: 13). However, the present article shows that Bao's claim is unjustified because the actual source of transfer was a variety of Chinese that differs significantly from Mandarin in the area of grammar he examined. Functional transfer is a kind of cross-linguistic influence occurring in individual speech that can lead to contact-induced language change in a community. In this kind of transfer, the functions of a grammatical morpheme from a source language are applied to a word in the recipient language that normally does not have a grammatical function (Siegel 2003, 2008a). For example, the Chinese substrate languages spoken in Singapore - Hokkein and related Southern Min dialects, Cantonese and Mandarin - all have a postverbal marker of completive or perfect aspect (often called perfective (PFT) in Sinitic studies). In Mandarin, this is 'le' (Bao 1995: 185).