Gilbert Puech
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
The languages of Malta
2018
https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.1181783
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Abstract
Of the three languages (or, in the case of Maltese English, varieties) represented in this collection, Maltese is perhaps the best-studied, with a rich tradition of descriptive and theoretical work and, more recently, experimental and computational studies. Maltese is the focus of six of the contributions in this book. Puech's paper on "Loss of emphatic and guttural consonants" traces the development of emphatic obstruents and gutturals that Maltese inherited from Arabic, but which underwent substantial change in the transition from Medieval to Contemporary Maltese. Puech's argument centres on evidence from documentary and other sources in the history of Maltese which, while written, nevertheless contain valuable insights and observations into ongoing changes in the Maltese sound system, enabling the contemporary linguist to map such changes over the long term. By contrast, Galea and Ussishkin's paper on "Onset clusters, syllable structure and syllabification in Maltese" contributes to an already sizeable body of work on the description of Maltese phonotactic constraints and syllable structure, here couched within an Onset-Rhyme model and stressing the role of sonority in determining possible onset clusters in Maltese syllables, yielding an exhaustive and fine-grained description of possible clusters that will provide solid grounds for future work on Maltese syllabification strategies and phonotactics. The contribution by Paggio, Galea and Vella, entitled "Prosodic and gestural marking of complement fronting in Maltese", is also concerned with phonological processes, but focusses on their interaction with gesture in spoken Maltese, a topic which has received comparatively little attention. The authors rely on a sample of annotated, spontaneous conversations in Maltese, identifying a subset of utterances that evince complement fronting, which is further broken down into subtypes (topicalisation, focus movement and left dislocation). These instances are further analysed according to gestural and prosodic characteristics, showing that fronted complements have a strong tendency to be accompanied by gestures and a falling pitch accent. At the same time, the phonological complexity and the tendency to co-occur with gestures is also dependent on the type of complement fronting in question. To date, this study is one of only a handful of studies on gesture and its interaction with other levels of linguistic analysis in Maltese. Of the remaining three contributions on Maltese, two papers, one by Lucas and Spagnol and another by Gatt and Fabri, focus on morphology. Like the work of Paggio et al, both have a strong empirical orientation. 2 Gilbert Puech Medieval Maltese inherited a set of three contrastive 'emphatic' obstruents from Arabic: ṭ, ḍ, ṣ, completed by sonorant ṛ. It also inherited a set of 'gutturals': plosive q, fricatives χ and ħ, sonorants ɣ and ʕ, and laryngeal h. In late medieval Maltese, the contrast between emphatic and plain consonants was lost, while stem vowels took over relevant lexical contrasts. In the eighteenth century, Maltese grammarians took note of ongoing changes in gutturals: weakness of h, loss of χ merged with ħ, and of ɣ merged with ʕ. In the nineteenth century, the set of distinctive gutturals was reduced to three consonants in most dialects: voiceless stop q, or its modern reflex ʔ, voiceless fricative ħ, and sonorant ʕ. The latter triggered complex processes of vowel diphthongization and pharyngealization. In modern Maltese, ʕ and vowel pharyngealization were lost. In contemporary Maltese, the allophonic realization [h], without pharyngeal constriction, gains ground over [ħ]. In Element Theory (ET), consonants share melodic elements {I}, {U} and {A} with vowels. Element{A}, which characterized the whole set of medieval emphatic and guttural consonants, is only involved in contemporary Maltese for /ʔ/ and /h/, corresponding to orthographic q and ħ respectively. I also propose a version of ET in which the element {C} characterizes surfacing consonants; the position is left empty if the consonant is lost. Empty positions are part of the phonological word structure and contribute to determining syllabic structure and stress assignment. 2 Loss of emphatic and guttural consonants