On Maltese prosody

Abstract

This paper reports on ongoing work aimed at consolidating the phonological analysis of Maltese within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework used in other work on intonation. It argues for an adaptation of a Tone and Break Indices or ToBJ-style annotation system, Ma/ToBI, for Maltese similar to that which has been developed for other languages, as a preliminary to such consolidation. The paper demonstrates the potential of a Ma/ToBT adaptation as a basis for creating a body of annotated data from spoken standard Maltese which will allow hypotheses on issues related to the prosody of Maltese which are still unclear to be formulated and tested, thus contributing to further analysis of the distribution of intonation patterns and their functions in Maltese. Such a functional analysis should in turn contribute to a better understanding of the workings of prosodic structure and intonation in Maltese in the broader context of prosodic typology.