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Kim, Chonghyuck. “The role of copula deletion on the emergence of a new grammatical feature.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 38.4 (2012): 223-254. Since the influential work by Labov(1969), much attention has been paid to the cause of copula deletion, or the conditions that govern the deletion. This paper investigates a hitherto uninvestigated aspect of copula deletion, the impact of copula deletion on the emergence of new grammatical features in a contact language, drawing on data from Singapore English. In the literature on Singapore English, novel grammatical features such as using already as a perfective marker and one as an emphatic marker have been described as unrelated individual grammatical features that have emerged under the strong pressure of the substratum language, Chinese. I argue that the innovative grammatical features have arisen not because of the strong pressure from Chinese but because of copula deletion; that is, that they have emerged in the grammar of Singapore English because of the need to fill the grammatical void created by the loss of be. By tying together what have been characterized as unrelated phenomena as a bundle of phenomena that have emerged from the same source, copula deletion, the impact of copula deletion is shown to be non-trivial on the emergence of new grammatical features in a contact language. (National University of Singapore)