A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

one plural form. This change will be made internally in the noun representation, so that the
paradigm constructors can still take both forms and thus changed at a later point if needed.
Another solution would be to have indeterminate plural forms stored as variants of the determinate
plural.
Plural formation
The noun plural can be formed by various morphological processes, as showed in table 2.9.
Table 2.9: Morphological processes for plurals
Type Process Singular Plural
Sound Suffixation (external) fergħa fergħat
Broken Internal change fergħa friegħi
Plural of plural Broken plural + suffixation tarf trufijiet (from truf )
Irregular Entirely different mara nisa
Foreign (Romance) Suffix change a → i karta karti
Foreign (English) Suffixation +s televixin televixins
Enclitic pronouns
Some nouns in Maltese can take enclitic pronouns to mark possession. For example, the word id
(‘hand’) takes the suffixed for of the pronoun tiegħi (‘mine’) to form idi (‘my hand’). The group
of nouns that allow this is relatively small and consists mostly of body parts, but the process
is certainly common enough to be handled in the grammar. The implementational details of
enclitic pronouns are discussed in section 2.3.3.
Implementation
Record type
The record type for nouns is as follows:
oper
Noun : Type = {
s : Noun_Number => Str ;
g : Gender ;
hasColl : Bool ;
hasDual : Bool ;
takesPron : Bool ;
} ;
param
Noun_Number = Singulative | Collective | Dual | Plural ;
Boolean fields hasColl and hasDual are required since GF does not support checking string
values at runtime (see section 2.5.4). takesPron specifies whether a noun takes enclitic pronouns
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