Kiasu

Resumé

This paper presents a study of grammatical usage patterns of the word kiasu in the GloWbE corpus of World Englishes. Kiasu has been borrowed from Hokkien into Singaporean and Malaysian English as a linguistic ‘glocalization’ process enabling speakers to verbalize an important local cultural schema. A grammatical profile is set up that draws on the techniques from linguistic profiling. This study identifies a range of patterns that illustrate how the interaction between grammar and lexis amount to specific semantic construals of the underlying cultural schema of the word.