2.2 Root-and-pattern morphology
2.3.2 Concatenative verbs
2.3.2 Concatenative verbs
Templatic verbs, indigenous and borrowed, constitute a closed list in Maltese. In the comprehensive database of roots and patterns I put together as part of this work, there are 1902 different roots from which 3962 templatic verbs are derived (cf. Ch. 4). Ac-‐
cording to Mifsud (2008: 156), 373 of these verbs (from 247 different roots) are Ro-‐
mance and English loans, a large number of which are recorded in old dictionaries, but are not current in modern standard Maltese.
Verb formation through root-‐and-‐pattern morphology is no longer productive (available rather than profitable, cf. Sect. 2.4). Other than one-‐offs, such as qanpen ‘ring out obstinately’ (cf. qanpiena ‘bell’), found in some literary works, virtually no new templatic verb is formed in modern Maltese (cf. Mifsud 1995a: 77). Particularly signifi-‐
cant is the fact that, in spite of the long contact with English stretching over two centu-‐
ries, there are only two verbs of English origin formed by the association of a root and a binyan, fajjar ‘hurl’ and tawwat ‘honk’ (cf. fire, toot). A curious formation is the quadri-‐
consonantal verb tmandar ‘get wasted’ (cf. mandra ‘mess’, sar mandra ‘get wasted, lit.
become a mess’ < Italian mandra, mandria) typically used in the sociolect of the youth.
The question arises regarding the formation of verbs in Maltese: why was the templatic verb formation strategy interrupted and a new, concatenative system contrived?
Many borrowed nouns that enter Maltese without difficulty cannot create templatic verbs, the main reason for this being their inability to fit into the disyllabic or monosyl-‐
labic binyanim. As Mifsud (1996: 118) notes:
Full naturalization in a S[emitic] sense is an exacting exercise which entails “dehydrating” the borrowed stem-‐base of its vocalic content, leaving only the consonantal structure which is inter-‐
preted as the root-‐base on the Semitic pattern, i.e. as a discontinuous morpheme which forms the skeleton of every verbal and nominal derivative.
Other than the difficulty to reduce polyconsonantal stems to 3 or 4 consonants to em-‐
ploy as a root, another serious handicap is the syllabic restructuring that is required to integrate loans into root-‐and-‐pattern morphology. Many Romance stems have been considerably changed both phonologically and morphologically to conform to the Se-‐
mitic verbal patterns. Consider the rather extreme cases bata ‘suffer’ from Sicilian patiri, and gaża ‘report’ from Sicilian accusari. Because of such constraints inherent in the binyan system, a more flexible system was required, which would not only accom-‐
modate the new verbal formations with the indigenous verbs, but also exhibit less se-‐
lective resistance to their syllabic configuration.
A solution in this sense was offered by the class of weak-‐final verbs, which was al-‐
ready used as a way out for a number of irregular or anomalous templatic verbs. Among the templatic verbs, which, either fully or partially, adopted the weak-‐final inflection, are reduplicative and silent-‐final verbs, and some verbs that end in a super-‐heavy sylla-‐
ble. It was also extended to all concatenative verbs for several reasons, the main two being the fact that (i) it imposes no restriction on the syllable structure or vowel pat-‐
terns of verbs, other than the phonological restrictions on syllable structures and vow-‐
els that apply throughout the language; and (ii) that, unlike the inflection used with strong verbs, it does not normally bring about any allomorphic change in the stem, ex-‐
cept for regular stress shift (cf. also Sect. 2.2.3).
This implies that there are two important differences in the stem structure and in-‐
flectional morphology of templatic and concatenative verbs. While the former comprise no more than two syllables and have a limited number of vowel patterns, there appears to be no restrictions on the number of syllables and the vowel quality in a concatenative verb stem. Secondly, concatenative verbs have a more simplified inflectional morphol-‐
ogy. As discussed in Sect. 2.2.3, templatic verbs have two sets of inflectional affixes, strong (-t, -et, -na, etc.) and weak (-ejt, -iet, -ejna, etc.), with some verb classes having cross-‐bred paradigms, e.g., silent-‐final verbs like sema’ ‘hear’ take the strong perfective suffixes in the third person (e.g., semgħ-et ‘hear-‐PFV.3SG.F’) and the weak ones in the first and second persons (e.g., sm-ajt ‘hear-‐PFV.1SG’). By contrast, all concatenative verbs have an a/ajt-‐final paradigm, with a smaller number of verbs taking the i/ejt-‐final para-‐
digm, as shown in Table 2.12.39
39 Concatenative verbs from Romance are systematically redistributed within the class of weak-‐final tem-‐
platic verbs (cf. Table 2.9 in Sect. 2.2.3), being assigned the a/ajt-‐final paradigm when the loan stem be-‐
longs to the first conjugation class in -‐are (cf. Italian emigr-are, Maltese emigr-ajt, n-emigra ‘emigrate.PFV,
IPFV.1SG’) and the i/ejt-‐final paradigm when it belongs to either the second or third conjugation in -‐ere or
Table 2.12 Paradigms of a/ajt-‐final ipparkja ‘park’ and i/ejt-‐final sploda ‘explode’
Perfective Imperfective Perfective Imperfective
1SG ipparkj-ajt n-ipparkja splod-ejt n-isplodi
2SG ipparkj-ajt t-ipparkja splod-ejt t-isplodi
3SG.M ipparkj-ajt j-ipparkja sploda j-isplodi
3SG.F ipparkj-ajt t-ipparkja splod-iet t-isplodi 1PL ipparkj-ajt n-ipparkj-aw splod-ejna n-isplod-u 2PL ipparkj-ajt t-ipparkj-aw splod-ejtu t-isplod-u 3PL ipparkj-ajt j-ipparkj-aw splod-ew j-isplod-u
As is evident from the table above, for a loan stem such as park to be integrated into the concatenative verbal system of Maltese, it has to undergo two processes, initial gemination (ippark-‐) and suffixation (-ja). The most distinctive characteristic of con-‐
catenative verbs is perhaps initial gemination, which is found in loan stems with a sin-‐
gle initial consonant (ippark-, cf. English park) and with an initial consonant-‐sonorant cluster (ikkmand-‐, cf. Italian comandare ‘command’). Unless the preceding word in the same phonological phrase ends in a vowel, in Maltese there is always a prosthetic vowel before initial geminates. By contrast, loan stems with sibiliant-‐initial (splod-‐, cf. Italian esplodere ‘explode’, żbilanċ-‐, cf. Italian sbilanciare ‘unbalance’) and liquid-‐initial clusters (irċiev-‐, cf. Italian ricevere ‘receive’, ilment-‐, cf. Italian lamentare ‘complain’) do not have geminate-‐initial stems. Needless to say, vowel-‐initial stems (ordn-‐, cf. Italian ordinare
‘order’, urt-‐, cf. Italian urtare ‘offend’) are also excluded from the gemination process.
For an analysis of the origin and distribution of initial gemination, see Mifsud (1995a:
140ff.).
Concatenative verbs, therefore, may be formally separated into three main con-‐
stituent elements:
(i) roots with possible gemination of the first consonant and a prosthetic vowel, e.g., √ORGAN, √PRETEND, √VER;
-‐ire respectively (cf. Italian discut-ere, Maltese iddiskut-ejt, n-iddiskuti ‘discuss.PFV, IPFV.1SG’; and Italian di-
vert-ire, Maltese iddivert-ejt, n-iddiverti ‘enjoy.PFV, IPFV.1SG’). For discussion of this phenomenon also in the case of templatic verbs of Romance origin, see Alex. Borg (1978: 325-‐327), Mifsud (1995a: 120-‐126; 1996:
121-‐122), inter alia.
(ii) verbal suffixes, i.e. -‐ja (ipparkja ‘park’), -‐ifika (ivverifika ‘verify’), -‐izza (or-
ganizza ‘organize’), and -‐ø (ippretenda ‘expect’);40
(iii) inflectional affixes, i.e. those used for weak-‐final templatic verbs, including the a/ajt-‐ or i/ejt-‐final distinction in the imperfective (cf. Table 2.9, Table 2.12).41
Finally, it is important to note that the concatenative verb formation strategy is not restricted to Romance and English borrowings, but is a fully productive process which operates in the formation of neologisms. A good case in point are verbs of Arabic origin which are formed concatenatively, such as iżżejtna ‘become oily (hair)’ (cf. żejt ‘oil’, żejtni ‘oily’) and iżżiftja ‘coat with tar’ (cf. żift ‘tar’). The productivity of concatenative (as well as templatic) verb formation awaits further investigation, using (i) psycholin-‐
guistic techniques, e.g., along the lines of Twist (2006), and Anshen & Aronoff (1988) and Baayen’s (1994) production tasks, (ii) dictionary comparison (cf. Bolozky 1999); as well as (iii) corpus-‐based measures for gauging different aspects of productivity (cf.
Baayen 1992, 1993; Baayen & Renouf 1996; Gaeta & Ricca 2006; inter alia).
2.4 Summary
Having examined the major features of templatic and concatenative verbs in Maltese, let us summarize the main conclusions.
The shaping of Maltese is marked by intimate inter-‐language contact between Ara-‐
bic, Romance varieties and, to a lesser extent, English, for about one millennium. Vari-‐
ous layers of borrowings from Old Sicilian, Italian, and later English, were deposited on top of the Arabic foundations laid down between 870, when the Arabs conquered Malta, and 1249, when the Muslims were expelled from the islands. Influence from European languages goes back as early as the 12th century, and grew steadily as Maltese lost con-‐
tact with its Arabic matrix and interacted far more with the European languages.
Caught at the crossroads of two cultures and two typologically diverse languages, Mal-‐
40 A subclass of the verbs that select the zero morph (-‐ø) take the -ixx- augment, e.g., issuġġerixxa ‘suggest’, which is not always present in the paradigms. See Mifsud (1995a: 169ff.) for an analysis of the distribution of -ixx- in loan verbs.
41 Strong affixes are therefore restricted to the inflection of templatic verbs. From a marginal system in root-‐and-‐pattern morphology, the inflection of weak-‐final templatic verbs has become the main system for the formation of the open-‐ended class of concatenative verbs.
tese, and in particular its verbal morphology, developed into what Mifsud (1996) calls a
“Romance-‐Arabic Crossbreed”.
Perhaps the most striking fact about Maltese is that, as a result of its long, multifari-‐
ous history of language contact, it has two verb formation strategies, root-‐and-‐pattern association, on the one hand, and concatenation, on the other. In this chapter, I offered a description of both morphological processes, outlining the main differences between two verb classes. To sum up, templatic verbs differ from concatenative verbs in five im-‐
portant ways.
1. Stem structure. All templatic verbs must be in the form of a binyan. For this rea-‐
son, both their syllabic configuration and vowel sequences are fixed: most of them are disyllabic, a few are monosyllabic, and each binyan allows for a small set of vowel se-‐
quences (cf. Sect. 2.2). By contrast, there appear to be no restrictions on the syllabic structure and vowel quality of concatenative verbs, other than the phonological restric-‐
tions that apply throughout Maltese.
2. Inflection. Templatic verbs may inflect for tense-‐aspect, mood, person, number, and gender in two main ways, taking either the strong (-t, -et, -na, etc.) or weak (-ejt, -iet, -ejna, etc.) affixes, with a number of them taking both affixes in different paradigm cells. Concatenative verbs, on the other hand, all take the weak inflection. As shown in Sect. 2.2.3 and 2.3.2, the inflectional system of concatenative verbs is more simplified than that of templatic verbs.
3. Derivational potential. While inflection is active in both verb classes, derivational morphology, such as causative, passive and reflexive formation by prosodic change, is limited to templatic verbs. This contrast between consonantal (templatic) roots that may be embedded in various verbal patterns, on the one hand, and syllabic (concatena-‐
tive) roots that are typically assigned one verbal interpretation, on the other, is viewed in this study as a critical point which explains: (i) the irregularity inherent in the binyan system (Ch. 3 & 4), and (ii) the distinction in the formal encoding of the causative-‐
inchoative alternation (Ch. 5).
Another difference in this respect concerns forms morphologically related to the two verb classes. For instance, the past participles and verbal nouns associated with templatic verbs may be decomposed into roots and patterns with prefixes and possibly inherent vowels, such as mvC1C2uuC3 (e.g., miksur ‘broken’), mC1vC2C2vC3 (e.g., imqas-
sam ‘divided out’) for past participles, and tC1vC2C2iiC3 (e.g., tkissir ‘breaking’), tvC1C2iiC3a (e.g., taqsima ‘division’) for verbal nouns. Those associated with concatena-‐
tive verbs are, however, formed by suffixation, with past participles taking -at or its
variants -ut and -it (e.g., ittajpjat ‘typed’) and verbal nouns taking the suffixes -ar/-ir (e.g., ittajpjar ‘typing’). Other nominalizing suffixes include -‐ment (e.g., inkoraġġiment
‘encouragement’), -‐zzjoni (e.g., fissazzjoni ‘fixation’), -‐nza (insistenza ‘insistence’), -‐aġġ (e.g., spjunaġġ ‘espionage, spying’), and -‐ing (e.g., welding ‘soldering alloy used in weld-‐
ing’).42
4. Etymology. Templatic verbs are predominantly of Semitic origin, with a few hun-‐
dred verbs from Romance and a couple from English, which have been subjected to the process of consonantal root extraction and embedding in one or more verbal patterns.
Concatenative verbs, on the other hand, are for the most part derived from Italian, Sicil-‐
ian and English, with very few from Semitic.
5. Productivity. One crucial difference between the two verb classes is the fact that one is closed, practically unproductive, and the other is fully productive. A refinement of the notion of morphological productivity is in order at this point. Bauer (2001, 2004) suggests that the term is ambiguous between availability and profitability. A morpho-‐
logical process is said to be available (disponible, Corbin 1987: 177) if it can be used in the production of new words, and profitable (rentable, Corbin 1987: 177) to the extent that it is actively used.
In this sense, verbal templatic morphology is unavailable because, under normal conditions, no new Maltese verb is formed through root-‐and-‐pattern morphology. Con-‐
sonantal roots could in theory be extracted from several loan stems, such as √prk from park-‐, √flm from film-‐, and then combined with binyan morphology (e.g., *parak,
*fellem), but in practice this does not take place. Instead, such loans, like any new verb in modern Maltese, are integrated into the verbal system via the concatenative forma-‐
tion, involving initial gemination and suffixation (ipparkja, iffilmja).43
42 There are a number of curious cases, such as:
(i) verbs with both a templatic and a concatenative past participle, e.g., pinġa ‘QI, draw’ having both
impinġi and pinġut ‘drawn’;
(ii) templatic verbs like vara ‘III, launch’ forming past participles and verbal nouns by suffixation (var-
at ‘launched’, var-ar ‘launching’) rather than root-‐and-‐pattern association;
(iii) verbal nouns with two markers, i.e. the templatic t- prefix and the concatenative suffix -‐ar, e.g., t-ranġ-ar ‘setting right’.
For a detailed discussion on the derivational potential of templatic and concatenative verbs and on such hybrid forms, see Mifsud (1995a: 68-‐72; 126-‐139; 247-‐251).
43 Mifsud (1995a, 1995b) argues that Maltese is undergoing a typological shift: from a basically non-‐
concatenative type, its morphology is evolving into a concatenative type, displaying a preference for invari-‐
able stems and marginalizing templatic forms which typically exhibit allomorphic variations. A case in point is the weak inflection, which, because it guarantees the formal integrity of the stem, has gained ground with reduplicative, silent-‐final, and concatenative verbs, as well as a number of anomalous forms (cf. Sect. 2.2.3).
In view of this difference in the productivity of the two verb classes, Hoberman &
Aronoff (2003: 76) have gone as far as to claim that “Maltese is a concatenative lan-‐
guage masquerading as a root-‐and-‐pattern language.” The implication is that “the lack of adherence to templatic constraints in borrowed verbs indicates that non-‐
concatenative morphology is not actively functioning in Maltese, suggesting that the profitability of root and pattern morphology is low or non-‐existent” (Twist 2006: 72).
However, for a class of verbs to be diachronically closed does not necessarily mean that it is no longer productive, and that its members can no longer be derived (in syn-‐
tax) at a synchronic level. As Borg & Mifsud (1999: 12) point out, “[e]ven if no new lex-‐
emes enter the language in the root-‐and-‐pattern method, this type of morphology is still synchronically at work in the thousands of Semitic verbs and nouns which form an in-‐
tegral part of Maltese”.
Although the class of concatenative verbs is undeniably the largest and most pro-‐
ductive, it has been demonstrated in an elicitation experiment designed to measure the relative productivity of the two verb formation strategies in Maltese, that root-‐and-‐
pattern morphology is productive (Twist 2006). Speakers were able to extract conso-‐
nantal roots from nonce items and merge them with verbal patterns. Quite strikingly, in some instances, speakers chose the templatic strategy even in response to real word stimuli with established verbs that are formed concatenatively. Responses to the nonce stimuli indicate that, in an experimental context centered on word structure that does not take such factors as semantics and language use into account, root-‐and-‐pattern morphology is a profitable strategy in Maltese, pace Hoberman & Aronoff (2003).
Further research in this respect is required (i) to support or refute either the posi-‐
tion that root-‐and-‐pattern morphology is unavailable or that it is unprofitable; (ii) to answer related questions, such as how do speakers decide which strategy to use to form new words; and (iii) to provide statistical calculations of productivity based on measuring profitability in corpora, along the lines of Baayen (1992, 1993), Gaeta &
Ricca (2006), and so on. Of particular interest are Bolozky (1999), who adopts different methods of measuring and evaluating productivity of word formation (productivity tests, dictionary comparison, and corpus analysis) in Israeli Hebrew, and Verheij (2000:
43ff.), who applies Baayen’s models to assess the productivity of the binyanim in Bibli-‐
cal Hebrew. Such experimental studies need to be replicated in Maltese in order to measure, among other things, the relative frequency and productivity of the various binyanim. I leave it to future research to investigate these and related issues.
In the discussion that follows, I seek to provide a unified approach to the two verb formation strategies by studying argument structure alternations, in particular the causative-‐inchoative alternation. However, having in mind the formal and semantic complexities associated with root-‐and-‐pattern morphology, I am led first to examine the class of templatic verbs in depth, with the aim of describing the morphology and lexical semantics of the binyan system in Maltese. To begin with, in Ch. 3, I refine some of the intuitions found in previous studies and discuss the assumptions that serve as the basis for the rest of the work. In Ch. 4, I then move on to characterize the binyan system both quantitatively and qualitatively by means of an exhaustive database of verb-‐
creating roots and the patterns they interleave with, before tackling the causative-‐
inchoative alternation in both templatic and concatenative verbs in the next phase (Ch.
5).
Chapter 3
The protagonists: roots and patterns
3.1 The ingredients of roots...54 3.1.1 Problems with the traditional approach ... 56 3.1.2 Roots are underspecified ... 59 3.2 The functions of the pattern...63 3.2.1 When a root appears in various patterns... 63 3.2.2 What functions do patterns have? ... 66 3.2.3 Do patterns have functions at all?... 70 3.3 Root derivation and word derivation...71 3.3.1 Cross-‐linguistic evidence ... 74 3.3.2 Word formation in Maltese ... 78
In the previous chapter, I gave an overview of the dual nature of Maltese verbal mor-‐
phology. Maltese verbs were analyzed as belonging to either of two main classes, tem-‐
platic and concatenative. The latter class, consisting mostly of loan verbs from Romance and English, is the only productively available means for building new verbs in modern Maltese. Templatic verbs, by contrast, constitute a closed class of verbs. The formation of new verbs by the interdigitation of a tri-‐ or quadri-‐consonantal root in a binyan is extremely rare in the current language. Root-‐and-‐pattern morphology, however, is fully functional synchronically in the numerous verbs and nouns that make up a large por-‐
tion of the basic lexicon of Maltese. Moreover, the availability of root-‐and-‐pattern mor-‐
phology is supported by psycholinguistic evidence from a visual masked priming ex-‐
periment (Twist 2006), though more research is needed in this area to measure the productivity of the two verb formation strategies.
The rest of this work aims at providing an analysis of verbs in Maltese as a single system combining the two types of morphology. Root-‐and-‐pattern morphology is taken as the starting point for the discussion. It seems reasonable to begin with an analysis of templatic verbs because (i) they historically precede concatenative verbs (cf. Mifsud 1995a: 253), and (ii) inflectional morphology is unmistakably of the Semitic kind for both verb classes (cf. Ch. 2). In addition, since templatic verbs constitute a relatively closed list, it is possible to examine a comprehensive corpus of verbs that belong to this
class in order to provide a detailed description of the binyan system in Maltese (Ch. 3
class in order to provide a detailed description of the binyan system in Maltese (Ch. 3