A Tale of Two Morphologies : Verb structure and argument alternations in Maltese

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Verb structure and argument alternations in Maltese

Dissertation zur Erlangung des

akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie

vorgelegt von

Spagnol, Michael

an der

Geisteswissenschaftliche Sektion Sprachwissenschaft

1. Referent: Prof. Dr. Frans Plank 2. Referent: Prof. Dr. Christoph Schwarze

3. Referent: Prof. Dr. Albert Borg Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 04.10.11

Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-163722

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To my late Nannu Kieli, a great story teller

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Acknowledgments

This study builds on a number of studies on the morphology and lexical semantics of Maltese verbs. It owes a great deal to three works in particular, Edmund Sutcliffe’s (1936) pioneering grammar, Albert Borg’s (1981, 1988) influential study on templatic verbs, and Manwel Mifsud’s (1995) detailed survey of loan verbs. It has greatly bene-‐

fited from Arad’s (2005) illuminating study of the verbs in Hebrew, Frans Plank’s thought-‐provoking seminars on the direction of derivation, and Martin Haspelmath (1993) and Bernard Comrie’s (2006) typological work on the causative-‐inchoative al-‐

ternation. If I argued against parts of their work, it was always out of deep admiration.

Many people have helped me put this work together. I am particularly grateful to Frans Plank for having taught me to think outside the box and to rethink what is inside the box. I am also indebted to Albert Borg, Manwel Mifsud and Alexandra Vella for hav-‐

ing instilled in me the passion for Maltese linguistics during my undergraduate studies.

Another important person in that period was Alina Twist. Assisting her in her doctoral work on Maltese verbs was the spark that ignited a string of events which led to the completion of the present work. I would like to thank Josef Bayer, Albert Borg, Miriam Butt, Eleanor Coghill, Bariş Kabak, Paul Kiparsky, Chris Lucas, Fatemeh Nemati, Frans Plank, Christoph Schwarze, and Adam Ussishkin for having discussed many ideas with me and for their detailed comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Ingrid Kauf-‐

mann deserves special mention for her comments and suggestions, and for having translated the abstract. I am very grateful to Mark Amaira whose help with the appen-‐

dices has been invaluable, and to Albert Gatt for his interest in my research and for his help at various stages of my work.

A special thanks to my friends, Elif Bamyacı, Laura Bonelli, Maialen Iraola Azpiroz, Thomas Mayer, Roxanne Mifsud, Fatemeh Nemati, Florian Schönhuber, Laura Sghendo Loredana Theuma, Joeaby Vassallo, Jonathan Xuereb, for their constant support. I also would like to thank my family. You are all very special to me, in particular my niblings, Nolan, Martina, and little Kieran, who was born only a few hours before this work went to print.

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This project was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Sonderforschungsbereich 471, “Variation und Entwicklung im Lexikon”, by the Compu-‐

tational Analysis of Linguistic Development, CALD Project, and by the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.

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Notational conventions

1. Phonetic symbols

1.1 Consonants

Orthographic Phonetic

b [b]

ċ [tʃ]

d [d]

f [f]

ġ [dʒ]

g [g]

ħ [ħ]

j [j]

k [k]

l [l]

m [m]

n [n]

p [p]

q [ʔ]

r [r]

s [s]

t [t]

w [w]

x [ʃ]

ż [z]

z [ts]

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1.2 Vowels

Orthographic Phonetic, short Phonetic, long

a [ɐ] [ɐː]

e [ɛ] [ɛː]

i [ɪ] [iː]

ie [ɪː]

o [ɔ] [ɔː]

u [ʊ] [uː, ʊː]

Notes

1. In Maltese, there is a close correspondence between orthographic and phonological representation. For this reason, throughout this study examples in Maltese are generally given in standard orthography. Note that orthography does not usually represent such phonological processes as final consonant devoicing and voicing assimilation. However, it does represent other processes such as vowel syncope and epenthesis.

2. Word stress is not indicated in the orthography (other than a few cases where the final, vowel-‐ending syllable is stressed, e.g., verità ‘truth’), but in many cases it is predictable from the syllable structure. Word stress is very often on the penulti-‐

mate syllable, unless there is a final superheavy syllable, which is always stressed.

3. There are two other orthographic symbols, għ and h, which have been described as virtual or ghost phonemes. Depending on the environment, they may have no pho-‐

netic realization at all, e.g., għasfur ‘bird’ /ɐsˈfuːr/ and hawn ‘here’ /ɐwn/, or may mark an increase in duration of an adjacent vowel, e.g., għamel ‘do, make’ /ˈɐːmɛl/

and hemeż ‘attach’ /ˈɛːmɛz/. In definable morphophonemic contexts, they are real-‐

ized as [ħ], usually in word final position, e.g., dmugħ ‘tears’ /dmʊːħ/ and ikrah

‘ugly’ /ˈɪkrɐħ/ or as [w], when occurring between two vowels, e.g., żagħżugħa

‘young girl’ /zɐˈzʊwɐ/and kruha ‘ugliness’ /ˈkrʊwɐ/.¹

4. Vowel quantity is not indicated, except for ie. Where necessary, I represent long vowels with repeated sequences, such as aa for [ɐː].

1 When għ occurs word finally and has no phonetic realization, it is orthographically rendered as an apos-‐

trophe, e.g., sema’ ‘hear’.

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2. Morphemic glossing

1 first person M masculine

2 second person PFV perfective

3 third person PL plural

DEF definite PROG progressive

F feminine PST past

FUT future PTCP participle

INCH inchoative REFL reflexive

IPFV imperfective SG singular

Notes

1. As far as is reasonably practical, the conventions followed are those given in The Leipzig Glossing Rules (Bickel et al. 2008).

2. It is standard to represent verbs in Maltese by the third person singular masculine perfective since it is morphologically unmarked.

3. Verbal, nominal and adjectival patterns are indicated by a string of C’s for conso-‐

nants and v’s for vowels, such as C1vC2C2vvC3. Subscript numbers represent the root consonants, doubled v’s mark long vowels, while doubled consonants indicate gemination.

4. Superscript i at the beginning of a word, e.g., ⁱssoda ‘strengthen’ and ⁱnkiteb ‘be written’, marks a prosthetic vowel, that is always inserted before initial gemination and certain consonants clusters, unless the preceding word in the same phonological phrase ends in a vowel.

3. Other abbreviations

R. regular (root) Red. reduplicative (root) v.i intransitive verb v.t transitive verb W-‐F weak-‐final (root) W-‐I weak-‐initial (root) W-‐M weak-‐medial (root)

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Abstract

Diese Dissertation behandelt die morphologische Struktur und die Semantik von Ver-‐

ben im Maltesischen. Das Maltesische gehört zu den semitischen Sprachen, ist aber durch den fast 1000-‐jährigen Kontakt zu den romanischen Sprachen sprachtypologisch zwischen den semitischen und den romanischen Sprachen anzusiedeln. Der Kontakt mit typologisch so unterschiedlichen Sprachen wie Arabisch, Italienisch und in jüngerer Zeit Englisch hat dazu geführt, dass das Maltesische über zwei unterschiedliche mor-‐

phologische Strategien verfügt: die für semitische Sprachen charakteristische “root-‐

and-‐pattern”-‐Morphologie und die konkatenative Morphologie. Im maltesischen Verb-‐

System finden sich daher einerseits Verben, die durch die Kombination von konsonan-‐

tischen Wurzeln mit festgelegten Konsonant-‐Vokal-‐Schemata (Binyanim, engl. templa-‐

tes) gebildet werden, und andererseits Verben, die durch Suffigierung gebildet werden.

Diese Arbeit gibt einen umfassenden Überblick über die beiden morpholo-‐

gischen Prozesse und ihrer Koexistenz im Maltesischen. Die Eigenschaften der beiden Verbklassen werden systematisch beschrieben und die wichtigsten Unterschiede in Be-‐

zug auf die morphologische Struktur der Stämme, die Derivations-‐ und Flexionsmor-‐

pheme, ihre Produktivität und ihre Etymologie herausgearbeitet. Auf dieser Basis wird dann eine einheitliche morphologische und semantische Analyse der Verben und Ar-‐

gumentstrukturalternationen im Maltesischen entwickelt. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Kausativ-‐Inchoativ-‐Alternation. Anhand einer umfassenden Datenbasis werden insbesondere die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen den konsonantischen Wurzeln und den Verbal-‐Schemata detailliert analysiert. Dabei werden die Beobachtungen und Be-‐

deutungsanalysen früherer Grammatiken des Maltesischen präzisiert und die morpho-‐

syntaktische Struktur der schema-‐basierten Verben im Rahmen der Distributed Morphology modelliert. In einer Gegenüberstellung der semantischen und morphologi-‐

schen Eigenschaften von Kausativ-‐Inchoativ-‐Verbpaaren aus beiden morphologischen Klassen werden schließlich charakteristische Unterschiede zwischen den beiden mor-‐

phologischen Systemen innerhalb des Maltesischen aufgezeigt.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

This work is an investigation on the morphology and lexical semantics of verbs in Mal-‐

tese, a language which typologically stands between Semitic and Romance languages, as it is genealogically related to Arabic, on the one hand, and has been in close contact with Italian and Sicilian for about one millennium, on the other. A long history of contact be-‐

tween typologically diverse languages gave rise to two different word formation strate-‐

gies in modern Maltese, root-‐and-‐pattern morphology and concatenative morphology.

Word formation in Maltese can be compared to a checkerboard on which language us-‐

ers may play chess and draughts, two different games with a different set of rules. For any given lexical item, a speaker of Maltese must know whether it is a piece for chess or a piece for draughts, and play the morphosyntactic game accordingly.

In the present analysis of the verbal system of Maltese, this translates as a distinc-‐

tion between templatic verbs, formed by the association of consonantal roots with a set of verbal patterns, and concatenative verbs, built by the combination of syllabic roots with verbal suffixes. In this study, I seek to provide a description of the two morpho-‐

logical processes and the way they coexist in one language. I begin with a contrastive examination, outlining the most important differences between the two classes of verbs in terms of stem structure, derivational and inflectional morphology, productivity, and etymology. Following that, I advance a unified morphological and lexical semantic ac-‐

count of Maltese verbs, by focusing on argument structure alternations, in particular the causative-‐inchoative alternation. In so doing, I give a detailed analysis of templatic verbs and the complexity of relations that hold between consonantal roots and verbal patterns.

Thus, the aim of this work is threefold. First, it describes the main characteristics of templatic and concatenative verbs in Maltese. Second, by examining a comprehensive database of consonantal roots and the verbal patterns they occur in, it refines some of the intuitions of previous grammars and develops an analysis of the morphosyntactic

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makeup of templatic verbs based on the model of Distributed Morphology. Finally, it studies the lexical semantics and formal encoding of the causative-‐inchoative alterna-‐

tion in both templatic and concatenative verbs, providing a comparative treatment of the two verb classes in Maltese.

The rest of this chapter, which serves as a curtain raiser for my study of Maltese verbs, is structured as follows. In Sect 1.1, I briefly review previous research on the verbal system of Maltese, motivating the need for the present work. Next, in Sect. 1.2, I introduce the general assumptions underlying the analysis and give an outline of the main argument of the study as a whole.

1.1 A tale to be told

Parts of this tale have already been told. The verbal system of Maltese has been the sub-‐

ject of several studies. Two important works are Albert Borg’s A Study of Aspect in Mal-

tese (1981), an elaboration of which was published in Ilsienna (1988), and Manwel Mif-‐

sud’s Loan Verbs in Maltese (1995).¹ As the title suggests, Borg’s work is primarily con-‐

cerned with the grammatical aspect of verbs in Maltese. However, a large part of his book is devoted to what he defines as a “tentative (and at times speculative)” semantic classification of verbs, in particular of templatic verbs of movement. The main focus of Mifsud’s work, on the other hand, is the integration of Romance and English loan verbs into Maltese. In describing the phenomenon, he provides an in-‐depth analysis of con-‐

catenative verbs, chiefly from a morphological point of view. Let us give a brief over-‐

view of these two studies.

Couched in a localist framework, Borg’s (1981, 1988) work gives a detailed exami-‐

nation of the morphosyntactic and semantic relations that hold among templatic verbs.

His main contributions are two. First, unlike other grammars, which focus on the se-‐

mantic and syntactic contribution of individual verbal patterns or binyanim (SG. binyan, from Hebrew ןינב ‘building’),² Borg looks at templatic verbs as constituting a system of relations among morphologically related verbs. Second, by examining the associations

1 For an overview of other grammatical works of Maltese, see Mifsud (1995a), Brincat (2004), and various other references made in the present study.

2 They are also referred to as themes, forms, conjugations, verbal stems, and awzaan ‘weights, measures’ in Arabic. Throughout this work, the two terms verbal patterns and binyanim are used interchangeably.

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between verbs sharing the same root consonants, he identifies certain pockets of regu-‐

larity in the binyan system in terms of transitivity and directionality of derivation.

Some tales need to be retold, in some more detail. While Borg’s study draws very im-‐

portant conclusions, most of which are reconfirmed in the present study, its main drawback is perhaps the fact that it focuses on a handful of templatic verbs, mostly verbs of motion. In this work, I build on Borg’s contribution by carrying out a quantita-‐

tive and qualitative analysis on a comprehensive database of templatic verbs in Maltese.

Another part of this tale has been told by Mifsud (1995a), who describes in great detail the assimilation of loan verbs, mostly from Romance and English, into Maltese. He proposes a four-‐way classification of loan verbs, based on the morphology and, in some cases, on the etymology of the verbs, which may be reduced to two main types. The first group consists of loans that, in terms of stem structure and derivational potential, are identical to templatic verbs (e.g., pitter ‘paint’, cf. Sicilian pitturi ‘painter’). The second group includes loans which are integrated into the verbal system of Maltese through concatenative morphology, typically involving initial gemination and some verbal suffix (e.g., ⁱpparkja ‘park’, ⁱssimplifika ‘simplify’).

Some tales beg a sequel. The current tale arises from the need to account for the di-‐

chotomous nature of the verbal system in Maltese. With Borg’s morphosyntactic and semantic examination of templatic verbs and Mifsud’s exhaustive study of the morphol-‐

ogy of concatenative verbs in hand, I set out to compare and contrast these two verb classes in Maltese with the aim of giving a unified account of some aspects of both sys-‐

tems. After describing the formal properties of the two verb formation strategies indi-‐

vidually, I seek to (i) establish the nature of the relation between the two morphologies, and (ii) determine whether the differences between templatic and concatenative verbs are purely morphological or whether there are deeper semantic and syntactic differ-‐

ences between the two verb classes.

In order to address these issues, I first examine an exhaustive list of templatic verbs from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, providing a morphosyntactic and lexi-‐

cal semantic analysis of the ways consonantal roots interact with the verbal patterns. In light of the finding that the main function of the binyan system is to mark argument al-‐

ternations, in the last part of this work, I take the causative-‐inchoative alternation as a starting point for a unified treatment of the formal and lexical semantic characteristics of templatic and concatenative verbs.

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1.2 Three sides to every tale

The structure of this work is as follows. Ch. 2 sets the stage for the rest of the study by providing an initial description of the templatic and concatenative verb formation strategies, and highlighting the points of convergence and divergence between the two verb classes. Following that, the tale takes two intersecting paths. The first one leads to an in-‐depth analysis of templatic verbs. In Ch. 3, I describe the regular and irregular sides of the binyan system in Maltese, and account for these conflicting aspects by in-‐

troducing two assumptions, one concerning the semantic contents of roots, the other dealing with a structural distinction in word formation. With this as background, in Ch.

4, I then move on to spell out and quantify the regular and irregular share in the mor-‐

phological realization and lexical semantics of templatic verbs. The second path leads to an attempt at a unified approach of root-‐and-‐pattern and concatenative morphology.

This task is the subject of Ch. 5, where the formal encoding of the causative-‐inchoative alternation by templatic and concatenative verbs is studied in light of the lexical seman-‐

tics of verbs in terms of internal and external causation.

Preliminaries

The plot of this tale unfolds in two main parts, one dealing with the binyan system, and another with the causative-‐inchoative alternation. They are preceded by Ch. 2, whose purpose is to pave the way for the main discussion by introducing a number of impor-‐

tant issues concerning the double-‐sided morphology of Maltese verbs. The chapter be-‐

gins with some background on the long, multiethnic history of Malta, which brought about the hybrid linguistic structures of Maltese. After briefly surveying the stratigra-‐

phy of the language, I introduce the two verb formation strategies. It is important to note that throughout this study, I follow recent work in Distributed Morphology (cf.

Marantz 2000, 2007; Arad 2005; inter alia) in adopting two interrelated assumptions.

One concerns the existence of the root as an underlying core, which is not fully specified in terms of form, meaning and lexical category. The second assumes that all morpho-‐

logical composition takes place in syntax by merging a root with some syntactic head.

Accordingly, root-‐and-‐pattern morphology is described from a rather traditional perspective. Templatic verbs, such as kiteb ‘write’, are viewed as composed of two in-‐

terdigitated segmental units, a tri-‐ or quadri-‐consonantal root (√ktb) and a binyan (C1vC2vC3). The verbal pattern determines the syllabic structure of the stem, including the number of syllables, vowel length, and gemination of root consonants. As the name

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suggests, concatenative verbs like intensifika ‘intensify’ are constructed in the more fa-‐

miliar structure involving morpheme concatenation of a syllabic root (√INTENS) and some verbal suffix (-‐ifika).

The rest of Ch. 2 spells out in detail the main characteristics of the two verb classes.

To begin with, I describe the two components of templatic verbs, including the formal properties of the consonantal root, co-‐occurrence restrictions in terms of place of ar-‐

ticulation, the controversy surrounding root-‐based analyses, the syllabic configuration of the binyanim and their vocalic sequences, and the debate concerning the inflectional or derivational status of the binyanim. After arguing that binyan morphology is essen-‐

tially derivational, I discuss the inflectional morphology of templatic verbs. Following that, I review some of the reasons why the templatic verb formation strategy was inter-‐

rupted and a new, concatenative system contrived. Finally, I describe the formation of concatenative verbs and their inflectional morphology, showing how they differ from templatic verbs with regard to their structural makeup, morphological productivity, derivational and inflectional morphology, and etymology.

The binyan system in Maltese

Drawing on these detailed descriptions, I move on to study the morphological and lexi-‐

cal semantic aspects of templatic verbs. The point of departure for the discussion in this section are the observations (a) that all templatic verbs must be in the form of a binyan, and (b) that one consonantal root typically occurs in more than one verbal pattern, even though the system is full of gaps, i.e. binyan slots that are left empty. Verbs derived from a single consonantal root may:

(i) mark a regular argument structure alternation (e.g., √ktb, kiteb ‘write’ – ⁱnkiteb

‘be written’) or have two semantically distant interpretations (e.g., √xrb, xorob

‘drink’ – xarrab ‘wet’);

(ii) have the same vowel sequence, as in kiteb and ⁱnkiteb, or display vocalic varia-‐

tion, as in xorob and xarrab;

(iii) be fully productive (e.g., passives in binyan V, tħassar ‘be cancelled’, always have an active counterpart, typically in binyan II, ħassar ‘cancel’) or exhibit gaps in the system (e.g., inchoatives in IX, smar ‘get tanned’, do not always have a corre-‐

sponding causative).

The binyan system, therefore, has two sides, a regular one (it marks regular argument structure alternations, exhibits no gaps, and retains the same vowel sequences) and an

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irregular one (allows for gaps, different vowel sequences, and multiple, unpredictable interpretations).

However, traditional grammars of Maltese generally view templatic verbs as a transparent combination of a root, which carries the core lexical meaning of the word, and a binyan, which has a fixed lexical semantic role such as causative, passive, reflex-‐

ive. On the basis of an examination of templatic verbs, I argue that:

(i) roots have minimal semantic content; they are assumed to be semantically un-‐

derspecified, and it is only when they are inserted in a verbal or nominal pat-‐

tern that they take on a specific interpretation;

(ii) there is no exclusive mapping between the semantic and syntactic properties of verbs and their morphological form (i.e. binyan): causatives, for instance, may appear in more than one binyan (e.g., binyan I, II and III); and verbs in the same verbal pattern (e.g., binyan V), may express different properties, such as in-‐

choative, passive, and reflexive.

The exact meaning of a verb cannot be unequivocally predicted from the core lexical meaning and grammatical features of its constituent morphemes, i.e. the root and the binyan, independently. I argue that the binyan system in Maltese is neither completely transparent nor totally opaque.

In the rest of Ch. 3 and Ch. 4, I try to answer two related questions. First, why is the binyan system not entirely ir/regular? And second, how regular and how irregular is it?

In order to address the first question, in Ch. 3, I introduce an assumption related to the formation of words, which neatly explains the behavior of templatic verbs. In line with Marantz (1997, 2001, 2007), Arad (2003a, 2003b, 2005) and other works couched in the framework of Distributed Morphology, I assume word-‐formation to be a syntactic process where roots, category-‐less, non-‐decomposable elements, merge with a syntac-‐

tic head, which turns the root into a noun, a verb or an adjective. However, words can be formed not only by combining a root with a category-‐bearing head, but also by com-‐

bining an already formed word with a new syntactic head. This structural distinction between words derived from roots and word derived from previously formed words translates into irregular, non-‐productive processes (root derivation), on the one hand, and regular, productive processes (word derivation), on the other.

Turning to the second question, after accounting for the inherent regularity and ir-‐

regularity in the binyan system by means of this distinction in word formation, the next step is to look at a comprehensive database of templatic verbs to quantify the regular

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and irregular portions in the system. This task is taken up in Ch. 4, which, to begin with, examines the distribution of roots among patterns, and the morphological productivity of the binyanim. Following that, it draws a number of generalizations on the relations that hold between verbs containing the same root consonants. This qualitative analysis reveals that roots fall into four main categories:

(i) argument alternations, roots that mark alternations such as active-‐passive, causative-‐inchoative, when they occur in more than one verbal pattern (61%);

(ii) synonyms, roots that create two or more verbs with identical meaning (18%);

(iii) singletons, roots that appear in one binyan only (12%);

(iv) multiple interpretations, roots that take on semantically distant interpretations when cast in different verbal patterns (9%).

In the remaining part of the chapter, I describe in detail the morphological realization of each one of these four categories. The regular and irregular aspects observed in each category is then connected to the structural distinction in word formation from roots and word formation from existing words, presenting a full-‐fledged account of the lexical semantics and morphological marking of templatic verbs in Maltese.

The causative-inchoative alternation in Maltese

In the final phase of this study, I provide a comparative analysis of templatic and con-‐

catenative verbs in Maltese by focusing on the causative-‐inchoative alternation, which is one of the basic argument alternations in Maltese. The chapter begins with a descrip-‐

tion of this verb alternation from a typological and a lexical semantic perspective. It first illustrates the cross-‐linguistic variation found in the formal encoding of the alter-‐

nation. Following that, it reviews some of the main theoretical views proposed in the literature on the underlying structures of causatives and inchoatives.

After arguing that the morphological irregularities of the causative-‐inchoative al-‐

ternation are best captured by a root-‐based analysis, I show how the alternation is un-‐

dergoing considerable change in Maltese. While templatic verbs generally mark the al-‐

ternation by means of two different morphologically related verbs (with the inchoative verb being generally morphologically more complex than the causative one), concate-‐

native verbs do not express the alternation overtly. Rather, labile verbs, i.e. ambitransi-‐

tive verbal forms, are used to mark both the causative and the inchoative alternant.

In spite of the differences in the formal encoding of the alternation by templatic and concatenative verbs, a unified analysis of the causative-‐inchoative alternation in Mal-‐

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tese can be provided if we assume that all verbs taking part in the alternation are cases of root derivation. In addition, a sentence creation task and a corpus study on a set of around 40 labile verbs in Maltese reveal that, even though they fail to show any mor-‐

phological mark that would distinguish the causative or inchoative alternant as for-‐

mally more marked than the other, labile verbs nonetheless evince a bias in transitivity.

In other words, labile verbs do not constitute a homogeneous class: some of them are more likely to occur in transitive frames, while others tend to pattern with intransitive constructions.

This difference among alternating labile verbs is then accounted for in lexical se-‐

mantic terms. Assuming that the morphosyntactic structure of verbs is directly related to their lexical semantic structure, I argue that the variation found in labile verbs in Maltese is sensitive to the kind of event denoted by the verbs in question, whether it is internally or externally caused. Externally caused events, like ⁱċċarġja ‘recharge’, are conceptualized as coming about due to a force external to the entity undergoing the change of state. By contrast, in internally caused events, like sparixxa ‘vanish’, the means for bringing about the change of state is conceptualized as residing in the entity undergoing the change itself. It follows from this that externally caused labile verbs are used more frequently in transitive constructions, whereas internally caused labile verbs occur more often in intransitive frames.

Finally, a general conclusion is found in Ch. 6. It is organized in two main parts.

First, it brings together the principal arguments and the main findings presented throughout this study. Second, it suggests a number of possible avenues for further re-‐

search in this area, with the aim of achieving an all-‐inclusive unified account of tem-‐

platic and concatenative verbs in Maltese.

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Chapter 2

Setting the stage

2.1 No language is an island ...10

2.2 Root-and-pattern morphology ...13

2.2.1 The root ... 18

2.2.2 The pattern... 26

2.2.3 Inflection of templatic verbs... 37

2.3 Concatenative morphology ...41

2.3.1 Templatic loan verbs ... 41

2.3.2 Concatenative verbs... 44

2.4 Summary...47

The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of Maltese verbal morphology as one di-‐

chotomous system where root-‐and-‐pattern morphology, typical of Semitic languages, rubs shoulders with concatenative morphology, which is in general the result of rather intense language contact with Italian varieties of Romance and, more recently, English.

In characterizing the templatic verbal morphology of Maltese, I occasionally draw on some insights from other Afroasiatic languages. The description of concatenatively formed verbs is followed by a comparison of the general properties of the two types of verbal morphologies in Maltese, laying the foundation for the rest of the work, which seeks to advance a unified morphological and lexical semantic account of Maltese verbs.

The structure of this introductory chapter is as follows. Sect. 2.1 starts off with a short flashback into the history of the language and a brief description of the linguistic stratigraphy of Maltese. Sect. 2.2 and 2.3 provide a detailed analysis of root-‐and-‐pattern and concatenative morphology respectively. Finally, in Sect. 2.4, I show how, in terms of stem structure, inflectional morphology and derivational potential, Maltese verbs can be divided synchronically into two classes, templatic and concatenative.

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2.1 No language is an island

The hybrid nature of Maltese and its shaping into a language which, as we shall see, is elusive to rigorous typological classifications is best understood in the light of the his-‐

torical and socio-‐cultural events that affected the Maltese islands. Due to their geo-‐

graphical position in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, at the periphery between southern Europe and North Africa, the history of the islands is characterized by a suc-‐

cession of rulers and colonizers, stretching from at least the eighth century BCE to the latter half of the 21st century when the country became independent and subsequently a republic. The Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Normans, and the Aragonese are among some of the cultural and political powers that made their linguistic mark on the inhabitants. A deeper imprint was, however, left by the Arabs who conquered the small archipelago in 870 and most probably imposed their language on the islanders. The pe-‐

riod of the Arabic dominance indeed marked the beginning of the Maltese language, more specifically in 1048 when the rulers brought to Malta a new community that spoke a Siculo-‐Arabic linguistic variety.

Though in origin Maltese was a dialect of Arabic, it almost immediately underwent a process of Latinization in 1090 when the Normans captured the islands and annexed them to the Kingdom of Sicily. By the second half of the 13th century, there was very little contact with the Arab world and the archipelago was completely Christianized.

Contacts with Sicily and the south of Italy became stronger and borrowings from Italian varieties must have begun to penetrate the native dialect. The Romance element branched further out into the Semitic structures of the language in the 16th century when the islands passed under the Knights Hospitaller of St. John for over two centu-‐

ries. At that time, Malta grew into a cosmopolitan centre, especially the Grand Harbor area, which teemed with intercultural activity. Even if the great majority of the Knights were French and Spanish, at the official level, Italian was used as the written language of the administration and culture, replacing Sicilian and Latin. Hoberman & Aronoff (2003: 64) rightly point out that “[i]t is striking and somewhat puzzling that a little over two hundred years of Muslim rule was sufficient to replace whatever language or lan-‐

guages had previously been spoken in Malta with Arabic, while the last seven hundred years have not seen that language supplanted by Sicilian or Italian.”

The role of Italian as the language of culture in Malta was threatened by the arrival of the British Empire in the 19th century. A process of Anglicization was set in motion, which led up to the Language Question, a linguistic and cultural conflict between the

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attempts of the British to oust the long established Italo-‐Maltese culture and the Italian language by using Maltese as a lever. In 1934, English, the language of the ruler, and Maltese, which by then had been standardized with a literature in early blossom, be-‐

came official languages, with Maltese as the national language at the expense of Italian.¹ The intricate history of the Maltese islands is mirrored in the stratigraphy of the language, which may be represented in a simplified manner in terms of three major strata. The main stratum is Semitic, forming the basis of the phonology, morphology, and the basic lexicon. Maltese shares many characteristics with Western Arabic, in par-‐

ticular Maghrebi dialects (Aquilina 1961a, 1979; inter alia). However, “[i]t is likely that successive waves of impact reached the Maltese shores from different Arab stations and at different points in the island’s history” (Mifsud 2008: 146). Maltese, in fact, displays a number of curious Levantine traits (Alex. Borg 1994, 1997; Borg & Mifsud 2002) and some researchers suggest that the main stratum of Maltese is actually Siculo-‐Arabic (Brincat 2004; cf. also Agius 1996).

The Romance superstratum is chiefly represented by lexical, syntactic, and, to a lesser extent, phonological and morphological accretions from Sicilian and southern Italian dialects (roughly from 1090 to 1530) and from Italian (from 1530 on). The influ-‐

ence of Italian comes down to the present day mainly through television programs, geographical and cultural proximity with Italy, as well as tourism and commerce.² For this reason, Italian can still be regarded as an adstratum in the linguistic stratigraphy of Maltese. Other than modern Italian, English constitutes a strong adstratum. It mainly consists of lexical material from the period of the British rule (1800 up to World War II) and, most importantly, to the postwar period and later, when English grew into a widely used language on an international level.³

Inter-‐language contact between morphosyntactic systems of languages as typologi-‐

cally diverse as Arabic (Semitic), Italian (Romance), and English (Germanic) gives rise to a heterogeneous language structure in Maltese. As a result of extensive contact with European, mostly Romance, languages, Maltese typologically occupies an intermediate position between Semitic and Romance, though in several respects it is closer to the former. From a comparative quantitative analysis it comes to light that “while Romance

1 For detailed accounts of the history of Maltese, see Brincat (2000, 2004, 2008), Borg (forthcoming), Mif-‐

sud (1995: Ch.2), Mifsud & Borg (1994), among others.

2 Brincat (1998, 1999) and Caruana (2006) study the acquisition of Italian through television among Mal-‐

tese speakers.

3 Since the development of Maltese is characterized by the presence of other languages, usually of greater prestige, it can be also described in terms of diglossia, as a low variety interacting with various high varie-‐

ties such as Latin, Sicilian, Italian, French and English (cf. Brincat 2004: 25-‐27, 249ff.).

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influence has moved Maltese typologically in the direction of Romance, Maltese still remains typologically closer to Arabic than to Romance” (Comrie 2009: 9-‐10). In other words, due to foreign pressure exerted on its Semitic structures, Maltese has undergone grammatical reorganization according to the patterns it interacted with only to a cer-‐

tain extent, which did not drastically change its Semitic character (cf. Mifsud 1995b).

A statistical analysis of the general lexicon reveals that the number of lexical items of Italian and Sicilian origin is rather high. According to Brincat (1996, 2000, 2004), the etymological sources of Aquilina’s (1987-‐1990) dictionary entries are distributed as follows: Semitic 32.41%, Siculo-‐Italian 52.46%, and English 6.12%. Local formations and items with obscure etymology make up the remaining percentage. Type vs. token frequency counts in journalistic texts reveal that items of Semitic origin (72.92%) are more frequent in use because prepositions, pronouns, and other grammatical words are mostly derived from Arabic (Fenech 1978: 140; Brincat 2004: 363-‐366).

It comes therefore as no surprise that Maltese is often described as a “mixed lan-‐

guage” (Aquilina 1958, 1959; Kontzi 1981; Farrugia 1998), a term in need of a clearer definition. The status of Maltese with respect to the typology of language contacts, how-‐

ever, is still an unsettled matter. Stolz (2003) argues that Maltese is not an ideal case of a “mixed language”, since no sharp distinction can be made between the lexical compo-‐

nent derived from one language and grammar belonging to another. Nor is Maltese an ordinary case of “massive borrowing”, because the non-‐Semitic share in the lexicon goes significantly beyond the 45 per cent borderline suggested in the language contact literature (cf. Bakker & Mous’s 1994 language intertwining approach). In a continuum of language typology, Maltese would therefore occupy an in-‐between position, pre-‐

sumably unfilled by any language, between clear cases of language mixing and massive borrowing (Stolz 2003: 306-‐308).⁴

From this brief sketch of the main linguistic phases in the history of Malta, it is ap-‐

parent that a variety of threads are woven into the linguistic fabric of Maltese. The con-‐

stant interaction between Semitic and Romance structures results in a double-‐sided morphology. For practically any lexical category, language learners of Maltese are faced with two word formation strategies. By way of illustration, verbs, agent nouns, and ver-‐

bal nouns may be formed both by merging a consonantal root with verbal or nominal patterns (cf. Table 2.1a) and by concatenating verbal or nominal affixes to a root or stem (cf. Table 2.1b).

4 Other studies on contact linguistics in Maltese include Drewes (1994) and Mori (2009).

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Table 2.1a Root-‐and-‐pattern word formation strategy

Root Word pattern Verb/Noun Meaning

√ktb C1vC2vC3 kiteb to write

C1vC2C2vvC3 kittieb writer

C1vC2C3a kitba writing

Table 2.1b Concatenative word formation strategy

Root Affix Verb/Noun Meaning

√TAJP -ja ⁱttajpja 5 to type

-ista tajpista typist

-ar ⁱttajpjar typing

In what follows, I lay stress on the verbal morphology of Maltese, which is like a fork in the road where root-‐and-‐pattern and concatenative morphology come together.

The systems are first dealt with separately (Sect. 2.2, 2.3), highlighting instances of fu-‐

sion between the two morphologies (Sect. 2.4). A unified, contrastive analysis that seeks to determine the nature of the relation between the two morphologies is then presented in Ch. 5.

2.2 Root-‐and-‐pattern morphology

Roots and patterns are basic concepts every student of Maltese is confronted with, es-‐

pecially when studying the verbal system of the language. The phenomenon is not char-‐

acteristic of Maltese in particular, but of Semitic languages generally. In Maltese root-‐

and-‐pattern morphology, verbs, as well as a large number of nouns and adjectives, are composed of two basic derivational morphemes, a consonantal root and a word pattern, interwoven within each other in a non-‐concatenative or discontinuous manner. The root is an ordered set of typically three or four consonants. The consonants of the root,

5 As discussed in Sect. 2.3, initial gemination operates as a general marker for concatenative verbs and nouns derived from them (cf. the discussion on word formation from roots and words in Ch. 3).