A New Look at Avoidance Phenomena in Maltese Roots

This paper examines consonant co-occurrence restrictions in Maltese triliteral roots, focusing on whether roots of Semitic and non-Semitic origin differ in their avoidance of homorganic consonants. Maltese provides a revealing test case because it preserves Semitic root-and-pattern morphology while also reflecting substantial Romance and English lexical influence. The analysis compares Maltese patterns with those of Classical Arabic and Italian using two Bayesian models: a zero-truncated negative binomial offset model of observed consonant-pair counts and a hurdle negative binomial model over the full pair-frequency space. Together, these models distinguish under-representation relative to expectation from the probability that a pair occurs at all. The results show that consonant co-occurrence restrictions remain robust in Maltese, with no substantial difference between Semitic and loan roots. Overall, Maltese patterns more closely with Arabic than with Italian, demonstrating the persistence of these restrictions despite extensive contact-induced lexical influence. Publication status: This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Maltese Studies, special issue on roots in Maltese and Semitic languages, edited by Michael Spagnol and Jessica Nieder. The final published version may differ from this manuscript.