Grammatical Gender in Maltese

✍ Scribed by George Farrugia

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 320
• Series: Studia Typologica, Vol. 23
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Is grammatical gender merely stored as a syntactic property of nouns, or is it computed according to a noun’s semantic, morphological and phonological properties every time it is required?
In many languages, gender appears to resist systematic treatment and can even cause problems for non-native learners. Native speakers of these languages appear to have no difficulty in assigning the correct grammatical gender to thousands of nouns in their language. Being an offshoot of Arabic, Maltese inherited a system comprising two gender categories, masculine and feminine. Numerous nouns were introduced in Maltese through contact with Sicilian and subsequently with Italian, two languages that also have a masculine/feminine-based gender system. However, the more recent contact, with English, seems to have complicated matters.
This work investigates how grammatical gender functions in Maltese, how native speakers apply different criteria to classify nouns, and how this choice is reflected in syntactic agreement. It also takes into consideration the wider psycholinguistic context that influences the choice of category, and provides valuable data for theories that seek to explain the linguistic categorization of nouns in various languages.

✦ Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
List of Tables
1. Introduction
2. What is grammatical gender?
3. Nominal classification
4. Grammatical gender in Maltese according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries
5. Grammatical gender in Maltese according to native speakers – the form of the noun
6. The conceptual underpinnings of gender assignment
7. Conclusions
References
Appendix I
Appendix II
Glossary
Index of Authors
Index of Languages
Index of Subjects

✦ Subjects

Grammatical Gender; Maltese; Language Contact; Grammatical Agreement