Tucker Matthew Alan. Building Verbs in Maltese

University of California. — Santa Cruz, 2013. — 350 p.This dissertation examines the morphosyntactic implications of verb-building in the Semitic language Maltese. Theoretically, the dissertation examines the role of functional heads in defining clausal morphosyntactic properties and the interaction of syntax and morphology in the domain of cliticization. The phenomena examined herein are: (i) the major clausal constituency of Maltese and the derivation of subject agreement morphology in periphrastic complex tense constructions, (ii) morphological and periphrastic causative formation and the absence of non-finite verb forms, (iii) the argument structure of ditransitives and the syntax of cliticization, and (iv) the implications of ditransitive argument structure as it pertains to analyses of the Person Case Constraint. The dissertation shows that these phenomena support a view of syntax wherein lexical properties of heads determine agreement morphology and the structure of clausal complements and a view of morphology wherein morphological constraints can influence the output of syntactic computation.