ABSTRACT
This chapter provides preliminary information concerning the phonemic inventory of Maltese and lays out certain assumptions that will figure into subsequent analyses. Maltese Arabic is spoken on the Maltese archipelago situated in the Mediterranean Sea approximately 60 miles south of Sicily and 180 miles east of the Tunisian coast. It presents an overview of the problems to be addressed with respect to the realization of imperfective triliteral verbs. The chapter focuses on the typical formation of the imperfective, first measure. It discusses and explains consonant/vowel metathesis in certain plural verbs and shows how the traditional view of metathesis is unable to account for all verbs. The chapter also shows how proposed analysis accounts not only for the realization of the metathesized vowel but, in addition, that of the imperfective prefix vowel. It also discusses implications of the study for the representation of total vowel movement and for underspecification theory.
