A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

Chapter 2
Resource grammar
This chapter details the implementation of a computational grammar for Maltese, using the
Grammatical Framework. Various phenomena in Maltese morphology and syntax are highlighted
and their implementation in the resource grammar explained. We then look at the
techniques used for testing the resource grammar and discuss its coverage. The chapter finishes
by looking at some of the implementational problems encountered during development.
2.1 Module structure
The Maltese resource grammar consists of 28 GF modules and follows the same module structure
as most of the other language implementations in the library. A module dependency graph
and descriptions of the contents of each module can be found in Appendix A. In line with convention,
all Maltese modules in the library are suffixed with the ISO 639-3 letter code Mlt. All
modules are located in GF’s source code repository in the directory lib/src/maltese. More
information about accessing the source code can be found in Appendix D.
A number of related languages in the RGL use a functor implementation, which allows
them to share syntactic constructs which are common and only override what differs in each
language. Examples include the Romance functor, which used in Catalan, French, Italian and
Spanish; the Scandinavian functor for Danish, Norwegian (bokmål) and Swedish; and a Hindustani
functor which powers the Hindi and Urdu resource grammars. The primary advantage of
having a functor implementation is code re-use, however the process of designing a common
functor can be quite involved.
The Maltese grammar does not use such an implementation. Despite containing elements
of both Semitic and Romance morphology, there is simply not enough in common with other
languages in the library to warrant the extra work involved in setting up a functor. Additionally,
the two languages arguably most closely related to Maltese — Arabic and Hebrew — do
not have complete RGL implementations.
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