Abstract
This study investigates the distribution of long and short independent pronouns in Maltese. By applying proposed positional and functional diagnostics to explain the variation between short and long pronouns (copular use, modification, coordination, peripheral positions) combined with a corpus study of pronominal form, person, and text type, this study sheds light on the factors that influence pronominal form and the status of reduced person forms in Maltese. While the copular use of pronouns does have a weak effect on pronominal form (long forms preferred), a stronger effect is observed with regard to grammatical person (1sg prefers short forms, 2sg & 3sg prefer long forms) and text type.
Acknowledgements
I thank the participants of the 4th International Conference on Maltese Linguistics in Lyon (2013) and the 47th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Poznań (2014) for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. All remaining errors and inconsistencies are, of course, entirely my own responsibility.
Abbreviations
- def
definite
- dem
demonstrative
- dis
distal
- f
feminine
- fut
future
- ipfv
imperfective
- io
indirect object
- m
masculine
- neg
negation
- pfv
perfective
- pl
plural
- poss
possessive
- prox
proximate
- prs
present
- rel
relative
- sg
singular
- sub
subordinator
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Used Corpora
MLRS (Maltese Language Resource Server) corpus (version 2.0): http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/CQPweb/malti02.
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