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Assessing productivity in contact: Italian derivation in Maltese

  • Benjamin Saade EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: January 10, 2019

Abstract

Studies assessing morphological productivity almost exclusively focus on single languages. Maltese with its heavily mixed Arabic/Italian/Sicilian/English lexicon lends itself perfectly for a broadening of the study of morphological productivity towards a more crosslinguistic approach. Numerous derivational formatives that have been borrowed from Sicilian and Italian into Maltese are readily applied in new formations. This study investigates the degree to which these borrowed formatives have developed new productivity patterns in Maltese or just replicated patterns that are present in the source language. After a detailed typology of possible formations with the borrowed formatives, the investigation compares quantitative productivity scores for a subset of cognate derivational affixes in Maltese and Italian based on corpus data and lays out a general methodological framework for comparing productivity crosslinguistically. The approach has the potential to enrich the methodological repertoire of language contact studies by enabling more detailed statements about the status of borrowed morphology in a recipient language.

Acknowledgements

This manuscript has benefitted from many different sides during its conception. First and foremost I want to thank Thomas Stolz for his continuing support for this project and his multitude of criticisms and suggestions to make it a better contribution to linguistic research. Furthermore, I have to thank the participants of the Mediterranean Morphology Meeting in Haifa (2015) where I presented a very early version of this paper. In particular, I have to thank Maria Grossmann, Anna Maria Thornton, Fabio Montermini, Giusi Todaro, Matteo Pascoli, Francesca Masini and Claudio Iacobini for their input and even more for their encouragement to pursue this topic further. This paper (especially the data part) would not have been possible without the support of the members of the Institute of Linguistics and the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta during a research stay in the spring of 2016. Here I just want to mention Ray Fabri, whose office I occupied during my stay. I also want to thank the doctoral network “Corpus linguistics” at the University of Bremen for the discussions on earlier versions of this paper. All remaining errors and inconsistencies are of course entirely my own responsibility.

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Published Online: 2019-01-10
Published in Print: 2019-01-26

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