Analogy in Contact: Modeling Maltese Plural Inflection
This research addresses a linguistic problem for computational linguists and language theorists, providing insights into analogical language change in contact situations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories.
The study tackled the problem of predicting Maltese plural inflection patterns by quantifying how phonology and etymology influence morphological processes, finding that phonological pressures have greater predictive power than etymology.
Maltese is often described as having a hybrid morphological system resulting from extensive contact between Semitic and Romance language varieties. Such a designation reflects an etymological divide as much as it does a larger tradition in the literature to consider concatenative and non-concatenative morphological patterns as distinct in the language architecture. Using a combination of computational modeling and information theoretic methods, we quantify the extent to which the phonology and etymology of a Maltese singular noun may predict the morphological process (affixal vs. templatic) as well as the specific plural allomorph (affix or template) relating a singular noun to its associated plural form(s) in the lexicon. The results indicate phonological pressures shape the organization of the Maltese lexicon with predictive power that extends beyond that of a word's etymology, in line with analogical theories of language change in contact.