Definiteness marking and the structure of the NP in Maltese

The article describes the facts about definiteness marking in the noun phrase (NP) in Maltese, and discusses the implications of the data for the structure of the NP or, more precisely, the Determiner Phrase (DP). Definiteness in the noun phrase in Maltese can be marked (a) both on the noun and the attributive adjective modifying it, (b) only on the noun but not on the attributive adjective, or (c) on neither the noun and the adjective. The fourth logical option of having definiteness marked on the adjective but not on the noun does not occur. The article explores the contexts in which (a) (b) and (c) occur, together with other facts concerning definiteness, namely the occurrence of the definite article on other elements in the NP apart from nouns, its non-occurrence in the construct state, and its co-occurrence with the demonstrative. On the basis of the data conclusions are drawn about the structure of the noun phrase in Maltese.peer-reviewe

Maltese

The Maltese language, locally known as il-Malti, is the national language of the Maltese Islands, which are situated in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Malta is situated 96 km south of Sicily and 288 km away from the North African coast, specifically from Tunisia. The Maltese archipelago consists of three islands, Malta, Għawdex (Gozo) and Kemmuna (Comino), which together cover an area of 315.6 km2. Gibraltar, to the West, is 1,826 km away and Alexandria, to the East, 1,510 km away (Azzopardi : 1995, pp. 18-19). Note that, for convenience, from now the name of the main island, Malta, will be used to refer to the Maltese Archipelago. Together with English, Maltese is also the official language of the state. This means, among other things, that the authorities are obliged to publish legal and official documents, such as laws, in both languages.peer-reviewe

Maltese

The Maltese language, locally known as il-Malti, is the national language of the Maltese Islands, which are situated in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Malta is situated 96 km south of Sicily and 288 km away from the North African coast, specifically from Tunisia. The Maltese archipelago consists of three islands, Malta, Għawdex (Gozo) and Kemmuna (Comino), which together cover an area of 315.6 km2. Gibraltar, to the West, is 1,826 km away and Alexandria, to the East, 1,510 km away (Azzopardi : 1995, pp. 18-19). Note that, for convenience, from now the name of the main island, Malta, will be used to refer to the Maltese Archipelago. Together with English, Maltese is also the official language of the state. This means, among other things, that the authorities are obliged to publish legal and official documents, such as laws, in both languages.peer-reviewe

Grammatical agreement in Maltese

Maltese displays a rich scenario of phenomena related to grammatical agreement between various sources and targets involving the categories of person, number and gender within various syntactic domains. After reviewing various definitions of grammatical agreement found in the literature, this study describes and discusses local agreement phenomena in Maltese in detail, exploring both Noun Phrase internal (e.g., noun adjective agreement) and Noun Phrase external agreement (e.g., verb subject agreement), as well as long distance agreement (pronoun - antecedent) with several illustrative examples. To complete the picture, this study also looks at cases of ‘quirky’ agreement which includes, among others, notional or non-formal agreement.peer-reviewe

Are all Semitic languages immune to letter transpositions? The case of Maltese

Recent research using the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm with English sentences that included words with letter transpositions (e.g., jugde) has shown that participants can readily reproduce the correctly spelled sentences with little cost; in contrast, there is a dramatic reading cost with root-derived Hebrew words (Velan & Frost, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14:913–918, 2007, Cognition 118:141–156, 2011). This divergence could be due to (1) the processing of root-derived words in Semitic languages or (2) the peculiarities of the transitional probabilities in root-derived Hebrew words. Unlike Hebrew, Maltese is a Semitic language that does not omit vowel information in print and whose morphology also has a significant non-Semitic (mostly Romance) morphology. Here, we employed the same RSVP technique used by Velan and Frost (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14:913–918, 2007, Cognition 118:141–156, 2011), this time with Maltese (and English) sentences. The results showed that Maltese–English bilinguals were able to reproduce the Maltese words—regardless of whether they were misspelled (involving the transposition of two letters from the consonantal root) or not, with no reading cost—just as in English. The apparent divergences between the RSVP data with Hebrew versus Maltese sentences are likely due to the combination of the characteristics of the Hebrew orthographic system with the Semitic morphology.peer-reviewe

Preface

This volume of the Journal of Maltese Studies aims at presenting the reader with a selection of studies focusing on selected issues in the morpho-syntax of Maltese, with contributions by linguists who are currently active in research. The aims of this volume are threefold: a) to showcase current research on Maltese syntax, both for a general and for a specialised audience, b) to provide an update of current, state-of-the-art descriptions and analyses of a selected set of topics in syntax in order to stimulate further research within these areas, especially among young scholars of Maltese linguistics, and c) to provide a general introduction to the study of the specific areas chosen while placing the study within a larger picture, and setting the stage for further studies in other related areas. Maltese has a long and intriguing history going back to its Arabic roots in the 11th century. Through the centuries up to the present, it has gone through phases of intense contact with non-Arabic languages, mainly Sicilian, Italian and English, that have sculpted its unique character and moulded it into a language that has achieved the status of national language and, together with English, official language of the Republic of Malta. Maltese is spoken by a large majority of the Maltese population on a daily basis and boasts a rich literature and a diverse media landscape.peer-reviewe

Maltilex : a computational lexicon for Maltese

The project described in this paper, which is still in the preliminary phase, concerns the design and implementation of a computational lexicon for Maltese, a language very much in current use but so far lacking most of the infrastructure required for NLP. One of the main characteristics of Maltese, a source of many difficulties, is that it is an amalgam of different language types (chiefly Semitic and Romance), as illustrated in the first part of the paper. The latter part of the paper describes our general approach to the problem of constructing the lexicon.peer-reviewe

Social deprivation and prognostic benefits of cardiac surgery: observational study of 44 902 patients from five hospitals over 10 years

Objective To assess the effects of social deprivation on survival after cardiac surgery and to examine the influence of potentially modifiable risk factors

The languages of Malta

The purpose of this volume is to present a snapshot of the state of the art of research on the languages of the Maltese islands, which include spoken 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 enjoying the status of official languages. Maltese is a descendant of Arabic, but due to the history of the island, it has borrowed extensively from Sicilian, Italian and English. Furthermore, local dialects still coexist alongside the official standard language. 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 variety of English has developed. To these languages must be added Maltese Sign Language, which is the language of the Maltese Deaf community. This was recently 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. Six of the contributions in this book focus on Maltese and explore a broad range of topics including: historical changes in the Maltese sound system; syllabification strategies; the interaction of prosody and gesture; the constraints regulating /t/-insertion; the productivity of derivational suffixes; and raising phenomena. The study of Maltese English, especially with the purpose of establishing the defining characteristics of this variety of English, is a relatively new area of research. Three of the papers in this volume deal with Maltese English, which is explored from the different perspectives of rhythm, the syntax of nominal phrases, and lexical choice. The last contribution discusses the way in which Maltese Sign Language (LSM) has evolved alongside developments in LSM research. In summary, we believe the present volume has the potential to present a unique snapshot of a complex linguistic situation in a geographically restricted area. Given the nature and range of topics proposed, the volume will likely be of interest to researchers in both theoretical and comparative linguistics, as well as those working with experimental and corpus-based methodologies. Our hope is that the studies presented here will also serve to pave the way for further research on the languages of Malta, encouraging researchers to also take new directions, including the exploration of variation and sociolinguistic factors which, while often raised as explanatory constructs in the papers presented here, remain under-researched