A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

oper
Pronoun = {
s : PronForm => Str ;
a : Agr ;
} ;
param
PronForm = Personal | Possessive | Suffixed ;
The Suffixed form of the pronoun is used when attaching to nouns and prepositions. The
pronoun suffixes for verbs however are not stored as part of the Pronoun record. Rather, the
agreement feature a in the pronoun is consulted directly and the correct suffixed form is chosen
within the linearisation function of a verb phrase, using the dirObjSuffix and indObjSuffix
operators in ResMlt.gf. For more on this see section 2.3.5.
2.3.3 Pronouns
The pronouns available in Maltese are very similar to those in English. Pronouns in Maltese
are often enclitic, joining with verbs to indicate direct/indirect objects, with nouns to indicate
possession and with pronouns as contractions. The suffix forms which the personal pronouns
can take are listed in table 2.16. While these can be seen of as a morphological process 2 , the
implementation in the resource grammar treat this is a syntactic processes via the bind token 3 .
Table 2.16: Different suffixed forms for enclitic pronouns. Square brackets indicate forms
which precede another enclitic pronoun in the dative.
Subject Nominative Noun/
Preposition
Verb accusative
(direct)
P1 Sg jien -i, -ja -ni -li
P2 Sg int -ek -ek, -k -lek
P3 Sg Masc hu -u, -h -u, -h [-hu] -lu
P3 Sg Fem hi ha -ha [-hie] -lha
P1 Pl aħna na -na -lna
Verb dative
(indirect)
P2 Pl intom kom -kom -lkom
P3 Pl huma hom -hom -lhom
2 Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander (1997) present pronominal suffixes as inflectional forms.
3 An early version of the grammar treated all pronominal suffixes as part of the inflection table. In the case of
verbs, this led to a table of around 1000 unique word forms which proved problematic to compile and use. Refer to
section 2.5.1.
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