Borrowed affixes and morphological productivity: A case study of two Maltese nominalisations

Among the derivational processes that have been adopted into Maltese based on
the Romance model, there are processes to derive nouns from verbs which are
relatively recent developments. Examples include the use of the suffix -Vr (e.g.,
spara/sparar ‘shoot’/‘(the) shooting’), and the use of -(z)zjoni (e.g., spjega / sp-
jegazzjoni ‘explain’/‘explanantion’). This paper discusses these processes in the
context of Maltese derivation in general. After a brief theoretical exposition and
an overview of Maltes derivation, we present a corpus-based analysis of the pro-
ductivity of -Vr and -(z)zjoni derivations, followed by an analysis of the evidence
for indirect borrowing in these two cases, based on the work of Seifart (2015). We
show that, while there is evidence that both are productive, the statistical evidence
suggests that -Vr processes are more likely to result in novel forms. By the same to-
ken, -Vr nominalisations more clearly represent cases of indirect borrowing, as ev-
idenced by the greater number of types which have corresponding simplex forms,
and by the greater probability that the simplex forms are more frequent than the
nominalisations.