ICPhS Satellite Workshop on “Intonational Phonology of Understudied or Fieldwork Languages” The Intonational Phonology of Maltese

This paper reports on work which is currently being carried out to consolidate the phonological analysis of Maltese within the AutosegmentalMetrical framework used in other work on intonation and in previous work of the author. Consolidation of the phonological analysis of prosodic structure and intonation in Maltese is expected to go hand in hand with annotation of data from a small corpus of spoken standard Maltese using MalToBI or ToBI-style conventions adapted for use with Maltese, similar to those which have been developed for other languages. The MalToBI adaptation will serve as the basis for the annotation of data from the corpus of spoken standard Maltese currently being undertaken as part of SPAN, as well as, eventually, of other data. It is hoped that annotated data from the project will be used to establish the distribution of intonation patterns and their functions in Maltese, and that such a functional analysis will contribute to a better understanding of the workings of prosodic structure and intonation in Maltese in the broader context of prosodic typology.