Supporting Impactful Research: MOE AcRF Tier 1 Grant Awarded to Asst. Prof. Tamisha Lauren Tan

This project studies how contact between languages that share a common history can shape grammatical change over time, focusing on three cases of contact between languages with different degrees of relatedness across Malayo-Polynesian -- Baweanese and Malay in Singapore, Helong and Meto-Amarasi in Timor, and Hawu and Indonesian in Sabu.

Through collaborative fieldwork, theoretical linguistic analysis, and historical-comparative archival research, this project investigates whether genetic relatedness facilitates the borrowing of morphosyntactic features such as word order, voice morphology, and person-marking. In addition to instantiating the first comparative study of family-internal contact in Austronesian to integrate documentary, formal, and diachronic approaches, and the first academic description of Singaporean Baweanese, this project will also broaden our understanding of Singapore’s rich linguistic heritage and connect local language communities to the broader history of the region.

 

Congratulations, Prof Tan!