A comparative study of China English and Singapore English: The case of grammatical metaphor in academic discourse

Only a few attempts have been made on comparisons between the indigenized varieties and foreign-speaker varieties of English. Surprisingly, for instance, there has been scarcely any comparative study on Singapore English and China English. This study aims to develop a framework allowing for the investigation of the indigenized varieties and learner varieties of English. Considering the situatedness of linguistic behavior, I propose that data from the same genre may be suitable for contrastive analyses of both varieties. The genre of academic discourse is selected for investigation, with the focus on grammatical metaphor (GM). The notion GM is brought in where the variation is essentially in the grammatical forms. My investigation involves qualitative analysis of GM identified in academic texts, their corresponding distribution between Singapore English and China English corpora, as well as discussion of their stylistic effects and the underlying generic and sociocultural conventions. The study finds relatively less GM in Singapore English texts than their Chinese counterparts within the academic genre. Chinese academic texts tend to exhibit a higher degree of technicality and compactness than the Singaporean counterpart, which could be explained in terms of the interaction between generic and sociocultural conventions.