Home Adverbial derivation in Maltese and Italian
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Adverbial derivation in Maltese and Italian

A starting point for studies in cross-linguistic productivity
  • Benjamin Saade EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 20, 2016

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, Baayens 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

References

Aquilina, Joseph. 1987–1990. Maltese-English dictionary, 2 volumes. Malta: Midsea Books.Search in Google Scholar

Baayen, Harald. 1993. On frequency, transparency, and productivity. In Geert E. Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1992, 181–208. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-017-3710-4_7Search in Google Scholar

Baayen, Harald. 2009. Corpus linguistics in morphology: Morphological productivity. In Anke Lüdeling & Merja Kytö (eds.), Corpus linguistics: An international handbook, 900–919. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110213881.2.899Search in Google Scholar

Baayen, Harald & Antoinette Renouf. 1996. Chronicling the Times: Productive lexical innovations in an English newspaper. Language 72(1). 69–96.10.2307/416794Search in Google Scholar

Bolozky, Shmuel. 1999. Measuring productivity in word formation: The case of Israeli Hebrew. Leiden, Boston & Köln: Brill.10.1163/9789004348431Search in Google Scholar

Borg, Albert & Marie Azzopardi-Alexander. 1997. Maltese. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar

Brincat, Joseph. 2011. Maltese and other languages : A linguistic history of Malta. Sta Venera & Malta: Midsea Books.Search in Google Scholar

Brincat, Joseph. 2012. La produttività del superstrato sull’adstrato nell’ integrazione di elementi esogeni. In Vincenzo Orioles & Giampaolo Borghello (eds.), Per Roberto Gusmani: Studi in ricordo, 61–72. Udine: Forum.Search in Google Scholar

Chircu, Adrian. 2008. L’ adverbe dans les langues romanes. Cluj Napoca: Casa Cărții de Știință.Search in Google Scholar

Fernández-Domínguez, Jesús. 2013. Morphological productivity measurement: Exploring qualitative versus quantitative approaches. English Studies 94(4). 422–447.10.1080/0013838X.2013.780823Search in Google Scholar

Gaeta, Livio & Davide Ricca. 2006. Productivity in Italian word formation: A variable-corpus approach. Linguistics 44(1). 57–89.10.1515/LING.2006.003Search in Google Scholar

Gatt, Albert & Ray Fabri. 2013. Morphological productivity in Maltese: A corpus-based investigation of Romance derivational processes. Talk given at the 4th International Conference on Maltese Linguistics, June 17–19 in Lyon.Search in Google Scholar

Grossmann, Maria & Franz Rainer. 2004. La formazione delle parole in italiano. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer.10.1515/9783110934410Search in Google Scholar

Majtényi, Melinda. 2012. The productivity of the prefix über-in English and Hungarian: A cross-linguistic, corpus-based study. Argumentum 8. 244–261.Search in Google Scholar

Maltese Language Resource Server Corpus (MLRS). Website: mlrs.research.um.edu.mtSearch in Google Scholar

Nishimoto, Eiji. 2003. Measuring and comparing the productivity of Mandarin Chinese suffixes. Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 8(1). 49–76.Search in Google Scholar

Plag, Ingo. 1999. Morphological productivity: Structural constraints in English derivation. (Topics in English Linguistics). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.Search in Google Scholar

Plag, Ingo, Christiane Dalton-Puffer & Harald Baayen. 1999. Morphological productivity across speech and writing. English Language and Linguistics 3(02). 209–228.10.1017/S1360674399000222Search in Google Scholar

Protopopescu, Daria. 2009. On adverb formation in Romanian. Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics 1. 187–197.Search in Google Scholar

Ricca, Davide. 2010. Adverbs. In Pierluigi Baldi & Philip Cuzzolin (eds.), Constituent syntax: Adverbial phrases, adverbs, mood, tense, 109–192. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110215458.109Search in Google Scholar

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. 2000. Iċ-ċkejken prinċep. L-Imsida: Mireva.Search in Google Scholar

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. 2008. Il piccolo principe. Milano: Bompiani.Search in Google Scholar

Scalise, Sergio & Antonietta Bisetto. 2008. La struttura delle parole. Bologna: Il Mulino.Search in Google Scholar

Stolz, Christel. 2009. A different kind of gender problem: Maltese loanword gender from a typological perspective. In Bernard Comrie, Ray Fabri, Manwel Mifsud, Thomas Stolz & Martine Vanhove (eds.), Introducing Maltese linguistics: Selected papers from the 1st International Conference on Maltese Linguistics, Bremen, 18–20 October, 2007, 321–354. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/slcs.113.22stoSearch in Google Scholar

Thomason, Sarah G. 2001. Language contact. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2016-12-20
Published in Print: 2016-11-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

Downloaded on 8.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/stuf-2016-0023/html
Scroll to top button