The shaping of Maltese throughout the centuries. Linguistic evidence from a diachronic-typological analysis

Throughout the centuries the Maltese morphological system has undergone restructuring with the integration of morphological processes from Romance languages and it was affected by mixture with a Semitic and Romance component. Thus a series of contact-induced changes have shaped Maltese as a “mixed type”. Linguistic evidence of the processes of restructuring and mixture can be found in early written documents in Maltese. The objective of this typological diachronic analysis is to present some evidence of the shaping of Maltese found in a corpus of Maltese texts (XVIIIth–XIXth centuries), by applying methodological tools developed in the field of Contact Linguistics.