Stem configurations, lexical items, and phonological words in Maltese

Abstract

Maltese is the 'national' language of the people in the sister-islands of Malta and Gozo. Originally Arabic, Maltese vocabulary has been massively expanded by borrowings from Romance (Sicilian/Italian), and more recently English. Influential contributions in (post)generative phonology and Optimality Theory claim that Maltese phonology is based on the interaction of (Palestinian Arabic type) stress assignment with syncope, and cyclic application of rules/constraints. This approach fails in some cases for Arabic Maltese, and is inoperative for borrowed vocabulary. I argue for distributing morphological constituents in three domains. The stem-domain heads a radical base, to which a preformative morph may be incorporated, and inflectional circumfixes. The Lexical-item domain heads the stem-node to which (in)direct pronominal objects may be concatenated. Clitics are adjoined to the phonological-word domain. All exponents are mapped on the linearized segmental tier. Trochaic stems satisfying morpho-lexical constraints are built in a pre-lexical phase. Vocalism is underlyingly specified or assigned by default, including ‘reverse-imāla’. In a lexical phase, OCP and Licensing shape syllabic stem-profiles to satisfy morpho-prosodic constraints. In the post-lexical phase, surface forms are generated by application of phonological processes: stress assignment, vowel length and quality, voice alteration in obstruents. A model of 'Weak CV Phonology', distantly related to Strict CV Phonology, is drawn up. Segmental representations are analyzed in monovalent elements. Maltese has often been presented as a 'mixed' language with two strata of vocabulary and two morphologies: root-and-pattern, non-concatenative for template-bound vocabulary, concatenative for loan-words. I claim that Maltese consistently requires templatic, concatenative and word-based morphology.