Volume 71, Issue 2 - Special Issue: The noun phrase in Maltese and Maltese English

Maltese noun phrases exhibit ‘definiteness agreement’ between head noun and modifier. However, the status of this phenomenon as a case of true morphosyntactic agreement has been disputed, given its apparent optionality. The present paper presents a corpus-based study of the distribution of adjectives with and without definite marking, and then tests the pragmatic licensing claim through a production study. Speakers were found to be more likely to use definite adjectives in referential noun phrases when the adjectives had a specifically contrastive function. This result is discussed in the context of both theoretical and psycholinguistic work on the pragmatics of referentiality.

This study investigates the distribution of long and short independent pronouns in Maltese. By applying proposed positional and functional diagnostics to explain the variation between short and long pronouns (copular use, modification, coordination, peripheral positions) combined with a corpus study of pronominal form, person, and text type, this study sheds light on the factors that influence pronominal form and the status of reduced person forms in Maltese. While the copular use of pronouns does have a weak effect on pronominal form (long forms preferred), a stronger effect is observed with regard to grammatical person (1 sg prefers short forms, 2 sg & 3 sg prefer long forms) and text type.

Maltese gives evidence of a certain degree of permeability of word-class categories in the sense that finite (intransitive) verbs in the 3rd person imperfective of both genders and numbers may function as NP-internal attributes and thus behave like adjectives, albeit only to a limited extent. The focus is on a small selection of those verbs which are typical representatives of the attributive functions of imperfectives. It is shown that in attribution members of this class of verbs undergo decategorialization, i.e. they lose typical properties of their original word class. In this context, the relation of pseudo-adjectival verbs, relative clauses, and bona fide adjectives is discussed in some detail. It is argued that pseudo-adjectival verbs are similar to active participles, which they replace in the case of the majority of the Maltese verbs which lack the ability of deriving active participles morphologically.

This article investigates factors that underlie the discrepancies in article omission between Maltese English (MaltE) and British English (BrE), with reference to further ENL, ESL and EFL varieties. We investigate seasons of the year, ordinal numbers, languages, proper nouns, titles, institutions and common nouns. Our sources include text corpora, and web and questionnaire-based data. Our key proposal is that MaltE has innovated a rule that the definite article may be omitted when the uniqueness or identifiability of a referent is salient in context. Furthermore, MaltE avoids the definite article commonly when the referent is generic rather than definite. The resulting MaltE system is regulated according to fewer parameters than in BrE, but more consistently.

Despite recent advances, Maltese English remains under-researched as a regional variety of English. This study employs an error analysis approach to identify its nominal characteristics based on the assumption that fossilized learner competences shared by a speech community eventually develop into new dialects and that transfer phenomena play a pivotal role. The study analyses article usage, singular and plural forms and noncount nouns and finds that overuse of the definite article is a likely candidate as a feature of Maltese English.