The Study Of Time Words In Singapore's Newspaper

"Lat Pau" is a modern Chinese newspaper in Singapore with the longest existence. It provides very valuable historical data for research of Chinese vocabulary in Singapore. This paper takes temporal words of "Lat Pau" as the research object,and expands discussion from such aspects as its form of expression, syntactic distribution, diachronic change and code switching and the influence of code mixing on it. In this paper,these temporal words are divided into two categories: time point and time frame temporal words. Their expression forms are classified in description.Among them, time point temporal words have rich forms of expression, which mainly include: date time words, week time words, hour time words and fuzzy time words;time frame temporal words have relatively less forms of expression due to newspaper timeliness impact. Each type of temporal word has its concrete form of expression. In terms of their grammatical distribution in the sentence, they are mainly used as adverbial and prepositional object. The diachronic changes in these temporal words have gone through such a process in which one or two forms of expression appear first, then new forms of expression appear, but with not very high frequency of use,next, the new and old forms are used simultaneously, and finally one form of expression becomes the major form of expression, while the other has reduced frequency of use or basically no longer appear. This diachronic change in temporalwords is a result of code switching and code mixing in the process of language contact. The different code switching of temporal words with the same syntax structure includes inner-sentence switching and inter-sentence switching,a smooth switching and vocabulary convergence type switching. Usually, inner-sentence switching appears first, then inner-sentence switching and inter-sentence switching coexist and finally inter-sentence switching becomes dominant. There are a variety of codes in Singapore society, which exert different impacts on diachronic development of temporal words in "Lat Pau".