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The linguistic description of Maltese has experienced an invigorating renaissance in the last ten years.As an Arabic language with a heavily mixed lexicon, Maltese serves as a laboratory for questions of linguistic variation on all linguistics levels, bilingualism, and language contact.

We propose, and provide corpus-based support for, a usage-based explanation for cross-linguistic trends in the coding of causal–noncausal verb pairs, such as raise/rise, break (tr.)/break (intr.). While English mostly uses the same verb form both for the causal and the noncausal sense (labile coding), most languages have extra coding for the causal verb (causative coding) and/or for the noncausal verb (anticausative coding). Causative and anticausative coding is not randomly distributed (Haspelmath 1993): Some verb meanings, such as 'freeze', 'dry' and 'melt', tend to be coded as causatives, while others, such as 'break', 'open' and 'split', tend to be coded as anticausatives. We propose an explanation of these coding tendencies on the basis of the form–frequency correspondence principle, which is a general efficiency principle that is responsible for many grammatical asymmetries, ultimately grounded in predictability of frequently expressed meanings. In corpus data from seven languages, we find that verb pairs for which the noncausal member is more frequent tend to be coded as anticausatives, while verb pairs for which the causal member is more frequent tend to be coded as causatives. Our approach implies that linguists should not rely on form–meaning parallelism when trying to explain cross-linguistic or language-particular patterns in this domain.

That many Arabic dialects negate with an enclitic –š has attracted much comment, very often drawing analogies between the French and Arabic systems. Constructs negated with a post-positioned negative –š alone without the characteristically Arabic preposed negator mā are said to bear similarities to stage III of the Jespersen's cycle as it operates in Indo-European languages. Nevertheless, comparisons between the copular interrogatives anīš or anāš and huwāš in medieval Andalusi Arabic, their 19th century Maltese counterparts jeniex and hujex, their survivals in modern Maltese huwa and hux, and their relics in the modern spoken Moroccan Arabic interrogative waš, and its equivalents huwwa/hiyya/humma in spoken Egyptian Arabic call such assumptions into question. From those, it appears that the enclitic –š began as an interrogative, having lost much – but not all – of its interrogative quality as it was reanalysed as a negator. As such, Arabic negation never went through a Jespersen's cycle.

Une visée comparative est adoptée dans cette étude traitant de la variation, notamment de la variation stylistique qui se produit en fonction du degré de formalité caractérisant la situation de communication et d’un nombre d’autres critères. La comparaison des situations sociolinguistiques présentes en contextes français et maltais permet de faire ressortir les caractéristiques propres à chaque situation. En français, la variation stylistique passe par le registre; en maltais, l’alternance codique maltais/anglais s’y ajoute pour la réalisation du style. Le français se distingue par une ampleur stylistique exceptionnelle, qui s’explique par diverses raisons culturelles, comme l’idéologie du standard et la portée de la littératie. Les deux cadres s’opposent par leurs processus de standardisation: le français, anciennement élu langue officielle, a naturellement suivi des schémas de progrès différents du maltais, langue officielle depuis bien moins longtemps, à l’héritage écrit qui ne remonte pas très loin dans le passé. Les deux langues partagent pourtant certains objectifs qui sous-tendent leurs efforts de protection. Des hypothèses sont émises quant à l’acceptabilité sociale de la variation aux différents niveaux d’analyse linguistique en maltais, et quant au type de variation proéminent dans cette langue, qui serait la variation sociale. Ces hypothèses sont construites par comparaison avec les arguments parallèles élaborés pour la situation française. This study adopts a comparative approach in dealing with language variation, mainly stylistic variation, which refers to the production of modulations in speech according to the degree of formality present in the communicative situation, and other criteria. A comparison of the sociolinguistic situations characterizing the French and Maltese contexts marks out the features defining each situation more clearly. In French, stylistic variation is realized through register; in Malta, Maltese/English code-switching is resorted to, alongside register, for style shifting. French stands out due to its wide range of style-sensitive features, a result of cultural realities, among which the heavy legacy of the written norm. In its standardization process, French, a centuries-old official language, naturally progressed differently from Maltese, which was much more recently elected as official language, and has a much younger literary heritage. Both languages nonetheless share some objectives in their self-protection efforts. Hypotheses are proposed as regards the degree of social acceptability of variation on different levels of linguistic analysis in Maltese, and as regards social variation being the dominant type of variation in this language. These hypotheses are constructed in comparison to parallel arguments previously advanced for the French situation by a number of sociolinguists.

This paper is concerned with the syntax of ditransitive verbs in Arabic. We concentrate on the vernaculars, focussing in particular on three geographically spread dialects: Egyptian Cairene Arabic, the dominant vernacular in Egypt, Hijazi Arabic, spoken in Western Saudi Arabia and Maltese, a mixed language with a Magrebi/Siculo-Arabic stratum. We show that all three exhibit an alternation (the dative alternation) between a ditransitive (‘double object’) construction and a corresponding prepositional dative construction, and outline a number of differences between these constructions in the different varieties of Arabic. We consider the distribution of verbs exhibiting the dative alternation in the light of Ryding’s (2011) observations concerning Modern Standard Arabic.