Quantitative approaches to productivity and borrowing in Maltese derivation
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Quantitative approaches to productivity and borrowing in Maltese derivation Benjamin Saade1
Received: 19 June 2018 / Accepted: 30 May 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper applies quantitative measures of productivity to a selection of Maltese derivational affixes borrowed from Italian/Sicilian. The productivity rankings of the selected affixes are compared to their Italian sources revealing identical rankings for the most productive affixes and slightly deviating rankings for the less productive affixes. It is argued that morphological productivity scores and the subsequent rankings form a pattern that is established in the recipient language by the sum of matter borrowings of formations involving the respective affixes. In conjunction with a discussion of the mixed lexicon and morphology of Maltese, a case is made that converging or diverging productivity rankings can be explained by wellstudied variables in language contact studies: intensity of contact, availability of registers/repertoires, and route of borrowing (direct/indirect). In addition it is shown that the cross-linguistic application of other quantitative measures, including a newly proposed Integration Factor and Seifart’s criteria for direct and indirect borrowing, can help uncover where the distributions of donor and recipient language affixes diverge, providing an exploratory tool for morphologist and contact linguists alike. Keywords Borrowing · Productivity · Derivation · Maltese · Italian
1 Introduction The quantitative study of morphological productivity is almost exclusively applied to single languages. In particular English, German and the major Romance languages make up the bulk of applications of the method. In these single language studies productivity is investigated synchronically as well as diachronically. While there have
B B. Saade
[email protected]
1
Malta Centre, Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, University of Bremen, P.O. Box 330440, 28334 Bremen, Germany
B. Saade
been a few studies trying to apply the method in a comparative fashion across languages, their employed methodology is not without flaws and they have a very restricted focus. A study by Gatt and Fabri (2018) assesses the productivity of two Italian affixes borrowed into Maltese but does not venture into a comparison with the productivity of the original source suffixes in Italian. Other studies (Saade 2016, 2019) have advanced the comparative methodology with a more appropriate approach but did not show in detail what the contribution of these studies to the theory of language contact might be. In this paper, the role of productivity as a bird’s eye view on morphological borrowing is discussed in a case-study on borrowed Italian/Sicilian derivation in Maltese. As a lexically mixed language (Arabic/Sicilian/Italian/English), Maltese is a perfect test case for the viability of the proposed procedure. The employed methodology is proposed as an exploratory diagnostic for different phenomena of language contact, touching on issues of MAT vs
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