Maltese : Contemporary Changes and Historical Innovations

This volume features nine articles, covering various aspects of Maltese linguistics:
Part I, mostly dedicated to the Maltese lexicon, opens with Bednarowicz’s comparison of Maltese and Arabic adjectives. Fabri then categorizes various types of constructions involving the preposition ta’ ‘of’. The paper by Lucas and Spagnol discusses Maltese words containing an innovative final /n/.
Part II deals with the syntax of Maltese: Azzopardi’s paper focuses on a construction in Maltese which consists of a sequence of two or more finite verbs. Just and Céplö present the first corpus based study of differential object indexing in Maltese.
In Part III on morphosyntax, Turek analyzes Arabic prepositions in Classical/Modern Standard Arabic and Arabic dialects and contrasts them with their Maltese equivalents. Stolz and Vorholt then analyze the structural and functional similarities and differences of spatial interrogatives in Maltese and Spanish. Vorholt then investigates the adpositions of sixteen European languages including Maltese and examines the relationship between length and frequency.
The volume is closed with Part IV on phonology and Avram’s paper, in which the diachrony of voicing assimilation in consonant clusters is reconstructed.