What type of language is Maltese?

Abstract

In his influential paper, Greenberg (1966) proposed a set of 45 language universals based on a comparison of thirty languages. Universals 1-25 cover syntactical properties of languages, mainly correlations between constituent/word order, while Universals 26-45 mainly cover morphological features such as, case, gender and number. Greenberg’s study has been expanded upon and critically assessed by many researchers, such as Hawkins (1983) and Dryer (1992), among others, but it still provides a general framework within which one can systematically investigate the morpho-syntactic properties of a language in terms of correlations (both absolute and implicational) expressed in the Greenbergian universals. This study sets out to explore to what extent Greenberg’s Universals 1-25 apply to Maltese and to determine where Maltese fits within a typology of languages implied by the Greenbergian universals. Each universal is discussed briefly and then applied in some detail to Maltese in order to arrive at a ‘grammatical sketch’ of the language. This analysis relies on data collected from descriptive grammars, published works and native speaker intuitions. The findings indicate that, on the whole, Maltese fits in well with the properties and correlations suggested by the Greenbergian universals.