Abstract
This paper assesses the productivity of adverbial derivation with {-ment} in Maltese with regard to its source {-mente} in Italian. In addition to a comparison of formation rules and restrictions in both languages, a traditional measure of productivity, Baayen’s P, is compared between Italian and Maltese, using a variable corpus approach suited for further cross-linguistic application.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the participants of the linguistics colloquium on word-formation (February 2013) at the University of Bremen and the 4th International Conference on Maltese Linguistics (June 2013) in Lyon for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. Furthermore, I want to thank two anonymous reviewers for their extensive and valuable comments. All remaining errors are, of course, exclusively my own responsibility.
Abbreviations
- 1, 2, 3
1st, 2nd, 3rd person
- adv
adverb
- adj
adjective
- def
definite
- dem
demonstrative
- f
feminine
- ipfv
imperfective
- m
masculine
- neg
negation
- pfv
perfective
- pl
plural
- prs
present
- sg
singular
- sub
subordinator
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Word-formation. Language contact, language contrast and language comparison
- Crosslinguistic influence on headedness of novel English compounds
- Of soundscapes, talkathons and shopaholics: On the status of a new type of formative in English (and beyond)
- Smoothing derivational asymmetries in English
- Adverbial derivation in Maltese and Italian
- Unorderly ordinals. On suppletion and related issues of ordinals in Europe and Mesoamerica
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Word-formation. Language contact, language contrast and language comparison
- Crosslinguistic influence on headedness of novel English compounds
- Of soundscapes, talkathons and shopaholics: On the status of a new type of formative in English (and beyond)
- Smoothing derivational asymmetries in English
- Adverbial derivation in Maltese and Italian
- Unorderly ordinals. On suppletion and related issues of ordinals in Europe and Mesoamerica