Ray Fabri, University of Malta: Interesting facts and quirks of object agreement marking in Maltese

Maltese has its historical origins in Arabic, probably, that spoken in Sicily in the 11th
century. Over time, its lexis has been enriched through extensive borrowing from
Sicilian, Italian and, more recently, English. As a result, Modern Maltese has
developed a combined stem-based and root-based morpho-phonology. Syntactically,
Maltese is a pro-drop language with relatively free word order, and rich agreement.
As well as subject-verb agreement, it also has a set of non-subject agreement clitics,
traditionally known simply as attached pronouns. These clitics display a number of
intriguing properties that go beyond what appears to be their main function as topic
markers.

The main aim of this talk to characterise the system of pronominal clitics in Maltese
with the aim of trying to account for the various properties and functions they display
in a unified manner. After a brief description of the basic topic-marking function of
pronominal clitics, including a brief mention of so-called ‘object diffuseness’, I will
outline three other functions. The first is that of marked construction in which the
doubled topic NP, untypically, is not definite and obtains a marked interpretation. The
second is the extension of a verb’s argument set by the addition of a new theta role
marked through an obligatory clitic. The third is perhaps the most intriguing, with the
pronominal clitic identifying a subject instead of an object NP, i.e., becoming a
subject instead of an object agreement marker. I will end by speculating about
whether these properties and functions can be accounted for in a unified way.

Læs mere om Ray Fabri: http://www.um.edu.mt/linguistics/people/rayfabri