Stem Configurations, Lexical Items, and Phonological Words in Maltese

What it is about

Maltese descends from Arabic but has a large Romance and English vocabulary. Cyclic accounts of Maltese stress (Brame's Stress Assignment) interacting with vowel syncope, from SPE through Odden, Hume, Kiparsky and Wolf, are judged by Puech to fail in some cases and to be inoperative for borrowed words. He proposes that morphology is distributed over three domains: the stem (a radical base with a preformative and inflectional circumfixes), the lexical item (direct and indirect pronominal objects), and the phonological word (clitics). Trochaic stems are built in a pre-lexical phase, vowel colour is specified underlyingly or assigned by default (including "reverse imāla"), and a monovalent "Weak CV Phonology" is proposed. The paper reports no counts; its evidence is well-formed words checked in the Maltese Language Resource Server.

Ideas

• I1. Tag each split in the segmenter tables of tools/hbo with its domain: a preformative belongs to the stem, an object suffix to the lexical item, a conjunction or preposition to the phonological word. Segmentation then runs in a fixed order and every split has a stated reason.
• I2. Keep vowel colour "unspecified" in the lexicon and fill it by a default rule only after segmentation, as Puech does. The unpointed mode of tools/hbo can then report which vowels were guessed by default.
• I3. Test any stress or vowel rule written for Hebrew loanwords separately on native and borrowed vocabulary, since Puech argues that cyclic rules break on borrowings.

For Mova

I1 and I2 go into tools/hbo (segmenter tables and unpointed mode), with the default-vowel note in Phonology of Biblical Hebrew. I3 is a test split for 3. Phonology.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.6556

@article{puech2023stem,
  title = {{Stem Configurations, Lexical Items, and Phonological Words in Maltese}},
  author = {Puech, Gilbert},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.6556},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.6556}
}

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