/library/oar/handle/123456789/90872 2025-12-29T11:51:30Z 2025-12-29T11:51:30Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/106664 2023-02-22T08:08:45Z 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The impact of age, input and media on second language acquisition of Italian in Malta Abstract: The Italian language and culture have held important roles in Malta in the past and both Italian and Sicilian have influenced heavily the language(s) spoken on the islands. Italian in Malta was especially widespread in the 70s and 80s, which is when Italian television programmes reached their peak popularity amongst the Maltese. However, this trend started changing after 1993, when cable TV was introduced in Malta providing access to television programmes from all over the world. In addition, the media today is mediated via the Internet, and the use English through this medium has taken spaces formerly occupied by foreign languages, including Italian . This research aims at investigating the role that the media has in the acquisition of Italian as a second language in Malta. The variables ‘age’, ‘formal onset’ and ‘type of input received’ (guided, spontaneous) will be analysed together with frequency of exposure to media in the L2. The interplay of these variables will shed more light on the field of second language acquisition of Italian in Malta. The first hypothesis is that age and formal onset do have an effect on L2 Italian proficiency because an early exposure to the second language not only allows learners to have more opportunities to practise the L2, but it can also act as a prime-mover to study the second language formally. The second hypothesis is that spontaneous learners, as opposed to guided ones, will demonstrate higher spoken and comprehension skills in L2 Italian. Data was collected by distributing a language background questionnaire that was completed by 377 Maltese respondents. Eighty participants were chosen on a sub-sample basis after having filled in the language background questionnaire. The respondents were asked to participate in three tasks: an informal interview held in Italian, an oral picture-description task in Italian and a written translation task from Italian into either Maltese or English. Results show that while age and formal onset are not statistically significant for high proficiency in the L2, early exposure to the second language leads to better performance in the assigned tasks; participants who had an early exposure to Italian via television obtained high scores both in the picture-story task and in the translation. With regard to the type of input received, there was not a significant difference in performance between the guided and spontaneous learners of Italian L2, as they both followed similar L2 acquisitional processes. Description: M.A.(Melit.)

2022-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/100185 2022-08-03T05:17:56Z 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: What type of language is Maltese? Abstract: In his influential paper, Greenberg (1966) proposed a set of 45 language universals based on a comparison of thirty languages. Universals 1-25 cover syntactical properties of languages, mainly correlations between constituent/word order, while Universals 26-45 mainly cover morphological features such as, case, gender and number. Greenberg’s study has been expanded upon and critically assessed by many researchers, such as Hawkins (1983) and Dryer (1992), among others, but it still provides a general framework within which one can systematically investigate the morpho-syntactic properties of a language in terms of correlations (both absolute and implicational) expressed in the Greenbergian universals. This study sets out to explore to what extent Greenberg’s Universals 1-25 apply to Maltese and to determine where Maltese fits within a typology of languages implied by the Greenbergian universals. Each universal is discussed briefly and then applied in some detail to Maltese in order to arrive at a ‘grammatical sketch’ of the language. This analysis relies on data collected from descriptive grammars, published works and native speaker intuitions. The findings indicate that, on the whole, Maltese fits in well with the properties and correlations suggested by the Greenbergian universals. Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.)

2022-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/100183 2022-08-03T05:16:31Z 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Analysing and predicting turn changes in communication Abstract: This dissertation deals with the analysis of the turn-taking system in natural conversation between two Maltese participants engaging in small talk. The analysis was done using a video from the MAMCO Corpus (Paggio and Vella, 2014) whereby participants interacting show multimodal cues in conversation. The data was analysed in a manner that includes head gestures, hand gestures, shoulder movements, posture shifts and intonation changes linked to turn-taking points. The analysis particularly focused on what type of gestures are attributed to turn changes, what intonation can convey regarding turn changes and what cues are specifically related to the feedback channel. The analysis includes both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. The data was annotated using the video annotation tool, ANVIL (Kipp, 2003). Features from the data were then extracted and analysed statistically using RStudio (RStudio Team, 2020) to find out how dependent the relationship is between the turn-taking system and certain gestures, and therefore, to find out how the turn-taking system can be predicted through gestures used in conversation. This analysis showed that head movements and intonation are particularly prominent in the turn-taking system and noticeable, also, in the feedback channel. Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.)

2022-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/100171 2022-08-02T05:24:34Z 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: An analysis of orthographic depth in the Maltese writing system Abstract: This dissertation aims to examine the orthographic depth of the Maltese writing system. A number of views are discussed as to the various linguists’ perspectives in relation to writing systems and to the orthographic depth. With the aid of different methodologies, an adequate calculation is identified for measuring the degree of transparency of the Maltese orthographic system. The results indicate that the Maltese orthography has regular letter-to-sound relations and therefore it very much is close to being treated as a shallow orthography. Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.)

2022-01-01T00:00:00Z