A Sociolinguistic Study On Grammatical Variation In Singapore Mandarin

Singapore Mandarin is a typical variety of Modern Chinese overseas, this paper selects it as our investigation object. Previous studies on Singapore Mandarin focused on chasing features of it which can be generalized as a feature-based approach. On the guide of variation sociolinguistics, this paper considers all the features discovered or to be discovered as grammatical variation in Singapore Mandarin and studies its variables and usages. After making a review of recent grammatical variation study on Modern Chinese, we import style as an important category, and on the base of Corpus, written materials and socio-questionnaires to make systematical comparison between grammar of Singapore Mandarin and Chinese Mandarin.The article starts with :(1)morphological variation; (2)full words variation; (3)empty words variation; (4)verbal predicate sentence variation; (5)sentence type variation; (6)text variation. six aspects to describe variation in Singapore Mandarin.Some conclusions are drawn as follows: (1)grammatical variations are distributed at every comer of grammar system; The variation were caused by different people use Singapore Mandarin in different space, different time and different domain; (2)The difference between Singapore mandarin and Chinese Mandarin are represented in style span and use frequency; (3) From view of six typical variables, we can see Singapore Mandarin has more written forms than that in Chinese Mandarin and vice versa; (4) variables have three convergence types towards standard which is expressed of abdication, substitution and co-existence in Singapore mandarin.This paper at last design a variation pattern characterized as from exertion-inducing variation to acquisition-inducing variation, and convergence or divergence will be governed by language environments and language internal system.