Grammatical agreement in Maltese

Abstract

Maltese displays a rich scenario of phenomena related to grammatical agreement between various sources and targets involving the categories of person, number and gender within various syntactic domains. After reviewing various definitions of grammatical agreement found in the literature, this study describes and discusses local agreement phenomena in Maltese in detail, exploring both Noun Phrase internal (e.g., noun adjective agreement) and Noun Phrase external agreement (e.g., verb subject agreement), as well as long distance agreement (pronoun - antecedent) with several illustrative examples. To complete the picture, this study also looks at cases of ‘quirky’ agreement which includes, among others, notional or non-formal agreement.