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The Languages of Malta The languages of Malta Edited by Patrizia Paggio Albert Gatt language Studies in Diversity Linguistics 18 science press Studies in Diversity Linguistics Chief Editor: Martin Haspelmath In this series: 1. Handschuh, Corinna. A typology of marked-S languages. 2. Rießler, Michael. Adjective attribution. 3. Klamer, Marian (ed.). The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology. 4. Berghäll, Liisa. A grammar of Mauwake (Papua New Guinea). 5. Wilbur, Joshua. A grammar of Pite Saami. 6. Dahl, Östen. Grammaticalization in the North: Noun phrase morphosyntax in Scandinavian vernaculars. 7. Schackow, Diana. A grammar of Yakkha. 8. Liljegren, Henrik. A grammar of Palula. 9. Shimelman, Aviva. A grammar of Yauyos Quechua. 10. Rudin, Catherine & Bryan James Gordon (eds.). Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics. 11. Kluge, Angela. A grammar of Papuan Malay. 12. Kieviet, Paulus. A grammar of Rapa Nui. 13. Michaud, Alexis. Tone in Yongning Na: Lexical tones and morphotonology. 14. Enfield, N. J (ed.). Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistic systems . 15. Gutman, Ariel. Attributive constructions in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic. 16. Bisang, Walter & Andrej Malchukov (eds.). Unity and diversity in grammaticalization scenarios. 17. Stenzel, Kristine & Bruna Franchetto (eds). On this and other worlds: Voices from Amazonia. 18. Paggio, Patrizia & Albert Gatt (eds). The languages of Malta. ISSN: 2363-5568 The languages of Malta Edited by Patrizia Paggio Albert Gatt language science press Patrizia Paggio & Albert Gatt (eds.). 2018. The languages of Malta (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 18). Berlin: Language Science Press. This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/182 © 2018, the authors Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: 978-3-96110-070-5 (Digital) 978-3-96110-071-2 (Hardcover) ISSN: 2363-5568 DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1181783 Source code available from www.github.com/langsci/182 Collaborative reading: paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=182 Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Albert Gatt, Felix Kopecky, Sebastian Nordhoff, Patrizia Paggio Proofreading: Aaron Huey Sonnenschein, Alexandr Rosen, Annie Zaenen, Brett Reynolds, Daniil Bondarenko, Gracious Temsen, Jeroen van der Weijer, Kate Bellamy, Lea Schäfer, Melanie Röthlisberger, Mykel Brinkerhoff, Paulson Skerrit, Steven Kaye, Vadim Kimmelman Fonts: Linux Libertine, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono Typesetting software:Ǝ X LATEX Language Science Press Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin, Germany langsci-press.org Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin Contents Acknowledgments iii 1 Introduction Patrizia Paggio & Albert Gatt 1 2 Loss of emphatic and guttural consonants: From medieval to contemporary Maltese Gilbert Puech 7 3 Onset clusters, syllable structure and syllabification in Maltese Luke Galea & Adam Ussishkin 55 4 Prosodic and gestural marking of complement fronting in Maltese Patrizia Paggio, Luke Galea & Alexandra Vella 81 5 Conditions on /t/-insertion in Maltese numeral phrases: A reassessment Christopher Lucas & Michael Spagnol 117 6 Borrowed affixes and morphological productivity: A case study oftwo Maltese nominalisations Albert Gatt & Ray Fabri 143 7 On raising and copy raising in Maltese Maris Camilleri 171 8 Rhythm in Maltese English Sarah Grech & Alexandra Vella 203 Contents 9 On the characterisation of Maltese English: An error-analysis perspective based on nominal structures in Maltese university student texts Natalie Schembri 225 10 Language change in Maltese English: The influence ofageand parental languages Manfred Krug & Lukas Sönning 247 11 Maltese Sign Language: Parallel interwoven journeys of the Deaf community and the researchers Marie Azzopardi-Alexander 271 Index 293 ii Acknowledgments The help and support of Martin Haspelmath and Sebastian Nordhoff in theprepa- ration of this volume is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank the authors of the chapters in this volume for their cooperation during the editing process and especially for their input to the reviewing of chapters by their peers. We especially thank the following additional external reviewers, who con- tributed their time and expertise to provide independent peer review for the papers in this collection: Lisa Bonnici, Jason Brown, Elisabet Engdahl, Marieke Hoetjes, Beth Hume, Anne O’Keefe, Adam Schembri, Thomas Stolz, Andy Wedel and Shuly Wintner. Chapter 1 Introduction Patrizia Paggio Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, University of Malta; CST, Uni- versity of Copenhagen Albert Gatt Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, University of Malta The purpose of this publication is to present a snapshot of the state of theart research on the languages of the Maltese islands, which include standard Maltese, Maltese English and Maltese Sign Language. Malta is a tiny but densely populated country, with over 422,000 inhabitants spread over only 316 square kilometers. It is a bilingual country, with Maltese and English as official languages. Maltese is a descendant of Arabic, butdueto the history of the island, it has borrowed extensively from Sicilian, Italian and English. Furthermore, local dialects still coexist alongside the official standard variety. The status of English as a second language dates back to British colonial rule, and just as in other former British colonies, a characteristic Maltese vari- ety of English has developed. To these languages must be added Maltese Sign Language (Lingwa tas-Sinjali Maltija; LSM), which is the language of the Maltese Deaf community. LSM was recenty recognised as Malta’s third official language by an Act of Parliament in 2016. While a volume such as the present one can hardly do justice to all aspects of a diverse and complex linguistic situation, even in a small community like that of Malta, our aim in editing this book was to shed light on the main strands of research being undertaken in the Maltese linguistic context. Patrizia Paggio & Albert Gatt. Introduction. In Patrizia Paggio & Albert Gatt (eds.), The languages of Malta, 1–6. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1181785 Patrizia Paggio & Albert Gatt 1 Overview of the volume Of the three languages (or, in the case of Maltese English, varieties) represented in this collection, Maltese is perhaps the best-studied, with a rich tradition of descriptive and theoretical work and, more recently, experimental and computa- tional studies. Maltese is the focus of six of the contributions in this book. Puech’s paper on “Loss of emphatic and guttural consonants” traces the devel- opment of emphatic obstruents and gutturals that Maltese inherited from Arabic, but which underwent substantial change in the transition from Medieval to Con- temporary Maltese. Puech’s argument centres on evidence from documentary and other sources in the history of Maltese which, while written, nevertheless contain valuable insights and observations into ongoing changes in the Maltese sound system, enabling the contemporary linguist to map such changes over the long term. By contrast, Galea and Ussishkin’s paper on “Onset clusters, syllable structure and syllabification in Maltese” contributes to an already sizeable body ofwork on the description of Maltese phonotactic constraints and syllable structure, here couched within an Onset-Rhyme model and stressing the role of sonority in de- termining possible onset clusters in Maltese syllables, yielding an exhaustive and fine-grained description of possible clusters that will provide solid grounds for future work on Maltese syllabification strategies and phonotactics. The contribution by Paggio, Galea and Vella, entitled “Prosodic and gestural marking of complement fronting in Maltese”, is also concerned with phonolog- ical processes, but focusses on their interaction with gesture in spoken Maltese, a topic which has received comparatively little attention. The authors rely ona sample of annotated, spontaneous conversations in Maltese, identifying a subset of utterances that evince complement fronting, which is further broken down into subtypes (topicalisation, focus movement and left dislocation). These in- stances are further analysed according to gestural and prosodic characteristics, showing that fronted complements have a strong tendency to be accompanied by gestures and a falling pitch accent. At the same time, the phonological com- plexity and the tendency to co-occur with gestures is also dependent on the type of complement fronting in question. To date, this study is one of only a handful of studies on gesture and its interaction with other levels of linguistic analysis in Maltese. Of the remaining three contributions on Maltese, two papers, one by Lucas and Spagnol and another by Gatt and Fabri, focus on morphology. Like thework of Paggio et al, both have a strong empirical orientation. 2 1 Introduction Lucas and Spagnol’s paper “Conditions on /t/-insertion in Maltese numeral phrases: A reassessment” investigates the factors which determine the insertion of a /t/ in cardinal numerals preceding a plural noun. The main puzzle here is the apparent optionality of /t/-insertion. This motivates the question whether the dis- tribution of /t/-insertion is due to phonological and/or morphological constraints. Lucas and Spagnol present an exhaustive analysis of data collected from a pro- duction experiment in which numeral phrases were elicited orally, using nouns with complex
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