Afterthoughts and Right Dislocation in Colloquial Singapore English: An Experimental Approach

Although some pragmatic analyses claim that Afterthoughts (AT) and Right Dislocation (RD) are speech errors, I show that AT and RD in Colloquial Singapore English (Singlish) are subject to the following generalization through an experimental investigation: Singlish AT and RD disallow bare predicates, and strategies such as sentence-final particles (SFPs) or degree modifiers are necessary for grammaticality. To account for this, I propose that AT and RD containing bare predicates violate the Anchoring Conditon (Ritter & Wiltschko, 2005; Tang & Lee, 2000; Yu, 2015) which requires events and states to be anchored to the utterance by time or by focus. I show that negation and aspectual marker already are also strategies that license AT and RD, and that these four strategies are able to anchor AT and RD by focus as they make reference to alternatives. I also suggest that Singlish RD is subject to an additional evaluative requirement, and that SFPs are a possible way to fulfil this requirement by virtue of being emotive markers (Rett 2021).