Camilleri Maris. Relative Constructions in Maltese

University of Surrey, 2003 - 12 p.This paper documents and introduces a description of Maltese relative constructions (hereafter
referred to as RCs). Maltese is a mixed language (Aquilina 1959), belonging to the Semitic family. What descriptions are available for the language, which deal with the constructions under discussion here, namely Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander (1997), provide a very limited description of one type of RC. For this reason, this paper aims to contribute more to the description of these constructions in the language, whilst formalising this within an introductory analysis in Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) (Dalrymple, 2001). The RCs in Maltese, which are essentially externally-headed and postnominal, as is the case with other head-adjunct constructions, will be described and analysed according to how they fare along two distinct parameters from the set of typological RC-related parameters posited in de Vries (2001). Section 2 looks at the relational-type parameter and discusses three types of RCs in the language, while in section 3, the focus will be on the relativisation strategy employed by these different types of RCs, which is then followed by a theoretical analysis within the LFG framework. Section 4 concludes the discussion.