Language Contact in Singapore Mandarin Xiangxin ‘Believe’ in Local Newspapers

Abstract

This paper investigates a novel use of the word xiangxin ‘believe’ in Singapore Mandarin (SgM) in which the pre-verbal nominal refers not to the believer, but rather to the subject of the propositional complement of xiangxin ‘believe’, functionally analogous to passive believe sentences in English (e.g. NP is believed to …), although no passive marking occurs in the SgM sentences. We argue for an adverbial analysis of this novel use of xiangxin, against previous views (Lin and Khoo 2018) that it exemplifies “raising” as in English be believed to sentences. Contrastive analysis of corpus data from Mandarin newspapers in Singapore and Mainland China establishes that this use is not found in standard Mainland Mandarin (MlM), where xiangxin ‘believe’ only allows the NP in pre-verbal position to be interpreted as the believer. We discuss the emergent adverbial use of SgM xiangxin ‘believe’ as an instance of language contact-induced change and in particular, as translation-induced language change (Heine and Kuteva 2003, 2005).