Prepositions and their Grammar in Maltese

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Stolz
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 412858441

The project seeks to describe the system of Maltese prepositions comprehensively. In the extant literature on Maltese language structures prepositions are not in the focus of interest. Thus relatively little is known about many aspects of their grammar and functional domain. There is as yet no consensus among the specialists about the size of the inventory of Maltese prepositions. The counts put forward in the literature oscillate between 17 and 44 prepositions. A review of previous proposals published since the 1930s reveals that there is disagreement as to what qualifies as a preposition. Difficulties arise in connection with the distinction of proper prepositions from other word classes such as adverbs. The possibility to have binary sequences of prepositions poses the general problem of determining the syntactic relation between the two prepositions. Only insufficient attention, if at all, has been payed not only to the interaction of prepositions and different classes of complements but also to the delimitation of the domains of (at least superficially) synonymous prepositions. To provide an adequate description of the synchronic systematicity of Maltese prepositions, the project aims at providing a handbook of Maltese prepositions which comprises five chapters, namely (A) a general introduction, (B) a commented dictionary with ample illustration of structural and functional phenomena associated with Maltese prepositions, (C) a grammar that results from the properties of the individual prepositions described in the dictionary, (D) the typological evaluation of the Maltese facts, and (E) the general conclusions as to the bearing the Maltese findings have on the general theory of prepositions. For the dictionary and the grammar, all levels from phonology via morphology and syntax to semantics are scrutinized. Among the topics which are specifically raised in Parts (B) and (C), there is, on the one hand, the possibility of dropping spatial prepositions like fi 'in' in combination with a toponymic complement and, on the other hand, the differential application of Equi-P-deletion under coordination. The project starts from the assumption that the system of Maltese prepositions can be captured in the format of a continuum or a radial category. To check the tenability of this working hypothesis the principles of the prototype approach to linguistic phenomena are adopted. The methodology is strictly qualitative and is indebted to Basic Linguistic Theory. More generally the project is situated in the framework of functional typology. The Maltese data are analysed exclusively from the synchronic perspective. The empirical foundation is provided by the Korpus Malti with a size of 250 million words. The results of this project will be made available in an open access publication. The project will provide students of Maltese, experts of adpositional systems, and typologists with valuable new data to be taken into account in their future research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants