Morphological productivity in Maltese verbs

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment that was designed to determine the morphological productivity of two possible verb formation strategies in Maltese: root and pattern on the one hand, and suffixation on the other. Native Maltese speakers created novel words in response to nonce stimuli. The stimuli ranged from phonotactically and prosodically acceptable, but non-existent nonce forms to those that contained segments and/or prosodic patterns typically found in English or Italian, but not native Maltese words. The results show that speakers are able to utilize both non-concatenative and concatenative strategies of word formation.