Loan Verbs in Maltese: A Descriptive and Comparative StudySevered from its parent language and from the other vernaculars, as well as from the Islamic culture and religion, the peripheral Arabic dialect of Malta has for the last nine centuries been exposed to large-scale contact with Medieval Sicilian, Italian and, later, English. Modern Maltese thus incorporates a great mass of borrowed words. This volume is a description of the processes by which Romance and English loan verbs have been integrated to varying degrees into the Arabic structure of Maltese morphology. It also proposes a typological classification of borrowed verbs in a continuum ranging from fully-integrated types to practically 'undigested' loans. The contact situation described here is of special interest both to Arabists and to scholars with an interest in language contact phenomena, especially in view of the basic incongruence between the languages involved, the long period of contact, and the small area in which it occurred. |
Contents
On the present work | 5 |
Definitions and notational conventions | 11 |
The background | 20 |
XVII | 31 |
Full integration to Semitic Maltese sound verbs | 49 |
Full integration to Semitic Maltese weakfinal | 80 |
The Romance baseform for integrating Type B and C verbs | 110 |
The categorization of borrowed verbal stems Types B | 116 |
Historical consonant changes | 187 |
The integration of undigested English stems | 213 |
26 | 228 |
Conclusions and findings | 252 |
Inflexional paradigms | 262 |
Corpora | 272 |
The historical development of weakfinal verbs | 296 |
| 319 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Al Hasa Alexander Borg allomorphic apheresis Aq.D Aquilina Arabic āre base-form basic Category CCC conjugation child's word class of verbs cognate conjugation Cv-Cv dialects display e.g. SM ending examples feature Gozo harking back historical Impf important infix infix išš inflexional suffix initial gemination integration îre Italo-Romance language lexemes linguistic loan stems loan verbs loan words modern morpheme n.ag nominal normally Note O.Ar occur origin paroxytone Passive Participle Perf Perfect sg phenomenon phonetic phonological prefix Pres proparoxytone radical reflexes related stem RM loan RM verbs Rohlfs root-base semantic Semitic Maltese Serr SM CCC verbs SM pattern sound verbs stem-base stem-extension stems beginning stress shift suffix syllabic syllabic pattern synchronically Table tion Type C verb unstressed Vanhove variant Vass verb classes verbal forms Verbal Noun verbal stems verbal themes verbs e.g. verbs of Type vinč vowel weak-final verbs