The aspectual system of Singapore English and the systemic substratist explanation 1 BAO ZHIMING Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore (Received 23 April 2003 ; revised 13 December 2004) Singapore English is a contact language with a constant linguistic substratum and superstratum. It lends itself to an interesting case study on how linguistic neologisms emerge out of a pool of competing features from the typologically distinct languages active in the contact ecology. This paper investigates the aspectual system of Singapore English and that of Chinese, the main substrate language, and of English, the lexical-source language. Despite the presence of competing aspectual categories from the two languages, the aspectual system of Singapore English is essentially the Chinese system filtered through the morphosyntax of English. Substrate influence is systemic, and the competing grammatical subsystems do not mix. The aspectual system of Singapore English, a contact language with a con- stant linguistic ecology, is markedly different from that of English, the lexical- source language. Although strikingly similar to the aspectual system of Chinese, the main substrate language, it is nevertheless not point-by-point identical to the Chinese system. A few aspectual categories that exist in the Chinese system are curiously missing in the Singapore English system. In this paper I present an analysis of the latter system and show that the partial con- vergence between Singapore English and Chinese in aspectual system results from the interaction of two intuitively simple constraints. First, substrate transfer in an ecology with a constant and active substratum involves an entire grammatical subsystem ; secondly, the morphosyntactic exponence of the transferred system must meet the grammaticality requirements of the lexical-source language. The lexical-source language acts like a filter, sifting out those categories of the transferred subsystem for which its grammar [1] Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the SPCL conference organized by the University of Coimbra, Portugal, at Tsinghua University, Taiwan, and at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. I thank Umberto Ansaldo, William Croft, Viviane Deprez, Claire Lefebvre, Yaron Matras, Steve Matthews, Dylan Tsai, Virginia Yip, Debra Ziegeler, and three anonymous JL referees for their comments. All errors of fact and interpretation are my own. The work is partially supported by National University of Singapore faculty research grants R103-000-015-112 and R103-000-035-112. I have also benefited from a visit in 2004 to the Centre of Chinese Linguistics, Beijing University. I would like to thank Lu Jianming, the director of the Centre, for his generous support. J. Linguistics 41 (2005), 237–267. f 2005 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0022226705003269 Printed in the United Kingdom 237