Restrictive Relative Clauses in Maltese

This paper provides a descriptive overview of restrictive relative clauses (henceforth RRCs) in Maltese, a construction which has received little attention to date and which is poorly described in existing grammars. We outline an LFG approach to the facts we describe bulding on existing analyses, and notably on Asudeh 2004/to appear, as far as the treatment of resumption in RRCs is concerned. Further we explore some issues raised by Maltese for approaches to resumption. 1 Maltese Restrictive Relative Clauses Maltese is a mixed language belonging to the South Arabic branch of Central Semitic, with a Maghrebi/Siculo-Arabic stratum, a Romance (Sicilian, Italian) superstratum and an English adstratum. Our data judgements are based mainly on the Naxxari dialect, a Noth-Western dialectal variety spoken by native speaker author: we note where different judgements would hold in formal (high register) Maltese. We can distinguish between three broad types of RRC in Maltese (i) li initial RRCS, (ii) wh-fronted RRCS and (iii) ‘partitive’ RRCS introduced by milli (from.COMP). The latter category raise some interesting questions of analysis, but for reasons of space we exclude them from consideration in this paper.