A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

The definite article is the proclitic il-, which becomes l- in front of vowels and where the l
changes to match succeeding coronal consonants: il- + dar → id-dar (‘the house’). The article
also joins with prepositions, ma + il- + fornar → mal-fornar (‘with the baker’). It is invariant
for gender, number and used for both both nouns/adjectives. Absence of the article gives the
indefinite form.
Except for the numeral wieħed (‘one’), all cardinal numerals precede the noun they quantify.
This is true for all other quantifiers and demonstratives, which are located to the left of the
noun which has to host the definite article if the demonstrative is used: dan + il- + ajruplan →
dal-ajruplan (‘this aeroplane’). Proper nouns are exempt from this rule.
The pronouns available in Maltese are similar to those as in English. Pronouns are often
enclitic, indicating possession when joined with nouns (e.g. missier + tiegħi → missieri, ‘my
father’), and as direct and/or indirect objects when attached to verbs (e.g. ħareġ + aħna → ħariġna,
(‘he took us out’)). Pronouns are only used as topic or for emphasis; otherwise Maltese is
generally a pro-drop language. Maltese has only a single relative pronoun li which is common
for all persons, genders and number.
Verbs have two moods: indicative and imperative (there is no infinitive in Maltese). The
indicative consists of two aspects: perfective for actions that have been completed, and imperfective
for those which are ongoing. Other tenses are formed by combining with the auxiliary
verb kien (‘he was’) and other particles such as ma for the negative.
(Rosner & Joachimsen, 2012; Stolz, 2011)
Vocabulary
Given the heterogeneous makeup of Maltese, it is no surprise that its vocabulary is also quite
varied. A study of the etymological sources of Aquilina’s dictionary surprisingly found that the
majority of lexical entries in Maltese are in fact Siculo-Italian (52%), followed by Semitic (32%)
and English (6%). The remaining percentage can be accounted for by purely local formations
and lexical items with unknown etymologies.
On the other hand, type vs. token frequency counts in journalistic texts have revealed that
almost 73% of items are of Semitic origin. This can be explained by the fact that prepositions,
pronouns, and other grammatical words are mostly derived from Arabic. (Spagnol, 2011, p. 12)
1.1.3 Maltese and the digital age
A recent META-NET report on the language (Rosner & Joachimsen, 2012) indicates that while a
number of linguistic resources do exist for the languages, Maltese is in general under-represented
in digital terms when compared to other European languages. As shown in figure 1.1, the
study finds that Maltese is best resourced with speech synthesis and text corpora, but very
poorly represented in other areas of computational linguistics. Specifically, to date there are no
computational grammars, morphological analysers, or text generation systems for Maltese.
A Eurobarometer report (European Commission, 2011) found that in Malta, 89.5% of the
respondents claimed that Maltese was their mother tongue. However when it comes to Internet
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