Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors as predictors of particle use. The results suggest a strong gender effect as well as several particle-specific ethnic effects. More generally, our study underlines the special nature of the grammatical class of discourse particles in CSE, which is open to new additions as the sociolinguistic and pragmatic need for them develops.

中文翻译：

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新加坡口语英语话语助词使用中的种族和性别差异

话语助词是新加坡口语英语 (CSE) 中评论最多的特征之一。它们的使用已被证明因形式、背景、性别和种族而异，尽管结果因一项研究而异。本研究采用新加坡英语讯息语料库(CoSEM)，一个由新加坡人撰写并使用电子信息服务发送的大规模文本语料库，用于调查性别和种族因素作为粒子使用的预测因素。结果表明强烈的性别效应以及几种特定于粒子的种族效应。更一般地说，我们的研究强调了 CSE 中话语粒子的语法类别的特殊性质，随着社会语言学和语用需求的发展，它对新的补充是开放的。