Slavomír Čéplö | Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (original) (raw)

Papers by Slavomír Čéplö

New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures – Volume 3, edited by Tony Burke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022

The Dialogue between Jesus and the Devil (Dial. Devil; CANT 84) is a narrative dialogue between J... more The Dialogue between Jesus and the Devil (Dial. Devil; CANT 84) is a narrative dialogue between Jesus and the devil that takes place amidst the temptation account of Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13. In the Greek manuscripts, the text is known as the "Discourse of our Lord Jesus Christ regarding the dispute with the devil" and the "Narration of the dispute of the devil with our Lord Jesus Christ." This apocryphal text has been given relatively little attention by scholars because of its general lack of translation into modern languages and the lack of a critical edition(s) of all known Greek and Church Slavic manuscripts. Dial. Devil provides a glimpse into Byzantine dialogue traditions, as well as the development of the character of Satan and the Antichrist in the late ancient and early medieval Christian world.

New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures – Volume 3, edited by Tony Burke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022

In the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome (Acts Chr. Pet.; CANT 198), the apostle Peter travels wit... more In the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome (Acts Chr. Pet.; CANT 198), the apostle Peter travels with Christ to Rome, where Christ works miracles and Peter is eventually martyred. Some plot elements are taken from the infancy gospel tradition and adapted for use in a story about Christ and Peter. Disguised as a child slave, Christ serves the aged Peter, performs wonders, and is sent to school. Versions are extant in Greek and Church Slavic. In the Greek, Christ also pretends to be the skipper of a ship, who initially feigns skepticism about Peter’s “Christ,” but eventually lets himself be baptized. In the Church Slavic, the skipper is the archangel Michael. Scholars have also called the story the Acta fabulosa of St. Peter, the Slavonic Acts of Peter, and the Slavonic Life of Peter.

Maltese Linguistics on the Danube, 2020

This paper examines the interaction of the focus particle lanqas with predicate negation. Using c... more This paper examines the interaction of the focus particle lanqas with predicate negation. Using corpus data, we provide a classification of syntactic constructions where such interaction occurs, based on whether lanqas serves as the sole negator, appears alongside the standard negative circumfix ma +-x or co-occurs with the negator la. We analyze and describe the patterns of use for each construction type, also noting the factors influencing the selection and its relationship to other syntactic phenomena, such as dislocation and verbal chains, and especially their effect on negative concord.

Arabic and contact-induced change, 2020

This chapter presents an overview of the most prominent contact-induced developments in the histo... more This chapter presents an overview of the most prominent contact-induced developments in the history of Maltese, a language which is genetically a variety of Arabic, but which has undergone significant changes, largely as a result of lengthy contact with Sicilian, Italian, and English. We first address the precise affiliation of Maltese and the nature of the historical and ongoing contact situations, before detailing relevant developments in the realms of phonology, inflectional and derivational morphology, syntax, and lexicon.

More New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, 2019

3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (3 Apocr. Apoc. John; =BHG 922k) is a revelatory dialogue between... more 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (3 Apocr. Apoc. John; =BHG 922k) is a revelatory dialogue between John the Theologian and Abraham that focuses primarily on the fate of the soul in the afterlife. In the available manuscripts, the text is simply titled “Apocalypse of holy John the Theologian”; it is designated the third apocryphal apocalypse to distinguish it from other noncanonical Johannine apocalypses, including the Questions of James to John, which some have called 3 Apocalypse of John. The variations in titles given to the Johannine apocalypses have also led to the identification of 3 Apocr. Apoc. John as 4 Apocalypse of John. While this apocalypse stands out from the others for having Abraham as John’s divine interlocutor rather than Jesus, the structure of the dialogue and citation of Scripture make 3 Apocr. Apoc. John at home among other Johannine apocalypses. The text is frequently confused with another dialogue text, the Questions of John to Abraham (Quest. John Ab.), extant only in Church Slavonic. It is included here as an appendix.

More New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, 2019

The Epistle of Pelagia (Ep. Pelag., CANT 211.VI) is a short Ethiopic text dated to the fifteenth ... more The Epistle of Pelagia (Ep. Pelag., CANT 211.VI) is a short Ethiopic text dated to the fifteenth century recounting a number of episodes from the postcanonical life of Paul the apostle. At the time of its first publication in 1904, the core episodes—those involving a baptized lion—were unique to apocryphal Pauline literature, save for two mentions in Latin and Greek sources, and thus offered a glimpse into the complicated
process of composition and transmission of the Acts of Paul. The intervening years have seen an expansion of the textual base to Acts Paul from Greek and Coptic manuscripts that include motifs previously known only from Ep. Pelag. Despite this new evidence, Ep. Pelag. remains an important witness to the transmission of Acts Paul in the medieval Christian world.

This paper is largely crap, I wrote it without knowing about Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala's "Testame... more This paper is largely crap, I wrote it without knowing about Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala's "Testamentum Salomonis Arabicum" (Universidad de Córdoba, 2006) which is an edition of the text. Now I obviously disagree with Monferrer-Sala's description/classification of the text as a recension of TestSol and I make a good case against it, describing the text as a composite and a sira of sorts. In addition to that, I identified further manuscripts and pointed out a Coptic connection (and a pretty cool one).

In the study of Maltese, much attention has been devoted to the analysis of topic and topicalizat... more In the study of Maltese, much attention has been devoted to the analysis of topic and topicalization, whereas comparatively little has been written on the subject of focus. For example, in Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander’s 1997 descriptive grammar of Maltese, an entire chapter is dedicated to topic and topicalization, while focus is addressed in four discontinuous paragraphs and only in phonological terms. The three major works that do discuss focus extensively do so primarily in order to analyze the role of focus in other phenomena (constituent order variation for Fabri 1993 and Fabri & Borg 2002, phonology for Vella 2009) rather than the semantics and syntax of focus itself. Consequently, a detailed study of focus in Maltese remains a desideratum. This paper is a step towards addressing this gap by using corpus data to examine one particular type of focus structure, that mediated by the so-called focus particles. In addition to analyzing the syntax and semantics of focus particles in Maltese and their role in the packaging of information in Maltese, the paper also examines the interaction of these particles and focus itself with other syntactic phenomena such as coordination and negation.

In this paper, I provide an edition and translation of a previously unpublished Christian Arabic ... more In this paper, I provide an edition and translation of a previously unpublished Christian Arabic apocryphon on John the Baptist – provisionally named On Herod and John the Baptist (On Herod Bapt.) – and an analysis of its relationship with Life Bapt. Serap., other Christian apocrypha and related traditions.

Since the publication of the long-lost Gospel of Judas in 2006, there has been a flurry of intere... more Since the publication of the long-lost Gospel of Judas in 2006, there has been a flurry of interest in canonical and noncanonical traditions about the famous betrayer of Christ. One text overlooked in this excitement is the Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver (Leg. Silv.), which traces the transmission of the coins paid to betray Jesus from Terah’s gift of the coins to Abraham up to Judas’s purchase of the Field of Blood in Acts 1:18-19. Leg. Silv. was a very popular text in medieval times and appears in a number of languages and forms, including Latin, Syriac, and Armenian, along with several European languages: German, English, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan. To date, relatively little work has been done on this text; indeed, there has yet to appear a formal critical edition. This paper aims to address this neglect by presenting, for the first time, an edition of the Syriac branch of the tradition. The text is extant in at least eight Syriac manuscripts, another six in Garšūnī, and it is found also incorporated into the Book of the Bee by Solomon of Basra. The paper includes also an overview of previous scholarship on Leg. Silv. and a discussion of the text’s origins and transmission.

This paper presents the results of a pilot project designed to functionally test the mutual intel... more This paper presents the results of a pilot project designed to functionally test the mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Tunisian Arabic and Benghazi Libyan Arabic. We compiled an audio-based intelligibility test consisting of three components: a word test where the respondents were asked to perform a semantic classification task with 11 semantic categories; a sentence test where the task was to provide a translation of a sentence into the respondent’s native language and a text test where a short text was listened to twice and the respondents were asked to answer 8 multiple-choice questions. We collected data from 24 respondents in Malta, Tunis and Benghazi which we analyzed to determine that there exists asymmetric mutual intelligibility between the two mainstream Arabic varieties and Maltese where speakers of Tunisian and Benghazi Arabic are able to understand about 40% of what is being said to them in Maltese, whereas that ratio is about 30% for speakers of Maltese exposed to either variety of Arabic. Additionally, we found that Tunisian Arabic has the highest level of mutual intelligibility with either of the other two varieties. Combining the intelligibility scores with edit distance data, we were able to sketch out the variables involved in enabling and inhibiting mutual intelligibility for all three varieties of Arabic and provide a rough analysis of the linguistic distance between them as branches of North African Arabic.

This paper describes an application designed for the functional testing of mutual intelligibilit... more This paper describes an application designed for the functional testing of mutual intelligibility of related varieties from its data structure to its interface and use.

In terms of word stress, the Czecho-Slovak dialectal continuum is generally marked by the prevale... more In terms of word stress, the Czecho-Slovak dialectal continuum is generally marked by the prevalence of fixed word-initial dynamic accent and contrastive vowel length with only two notable exceptions: Silesian Lach dialects with their Polish combination of fixed penultimate stress and absence of contrastive length and South-Western Bohemian dialects (Plzeň, České Budějovice and environs) with their characteristic word prosody ("Pilsen singing") and contrastive length (Holub and Greenberg 2013). In this paper, we highlight two other areas within the Czecho-Slovak dialectal continuum with stress and word prosody configuration markedly different from the norm: the first is Bratislava where the local dialect of Slovak is nearly identical to Standard Slovak down to word-initial stress, but the stressed syllable is notable for its rising pitch contour (known as the "Blava accent"). The second area is Eastern Slovakia, i.e. the dialects of the ancient provinces of Spiš, Šariš, Zemplín, Abov and Gemer, markedly different from Standard Slovak based on Central dialects. The Eastern dialects have long been known for their absence of contrastive length and penultimate stress, but little has been written about the typical rising pitch contours associated with stressed syllable universally described as the "Eastern drawl" and prevalent even in Standard Slovak spoken in the area. In this paper, we investigate the two phenomena examining their nature, their connection to each other and to related phenomena in other Slavic languages (particularly the pitch accent typical of some South Slavic languages) and history.

Perspectives on Maltese Linguistics, Feb 2014

Dan l-artiklu jittratta strutturi sintattiċi fejn l-oġġett u -pronom meħmuż li jirrefe... more Dan l-artiklu jittratta strutturi sintattiċi fejn l-oġġett u -pronom meħmuż li jirreferi għalih jinsabu flimkien fl-istess sentenza. Dan il-fenomenu, magħruf bħala ‘id-duplikazzjoni tal-oġġett’ jew ‘l- irduppjar permezz ta’ klitiku’, hu kkunsidrat wieħed mill-karatteristiċi tal-ilsna Balkaniċi, imma jinstab ukoll f’ilsna oħra, fosthom l-ilsna Rumanzi minn barra l-pajjiżi Balkani kif ukoll fl-ilsna Semitiċi. F’dan l-artiklu nipprovaw nużaw ir-riċerka fid-duplikazzjoni tal-oġġett f’dawn il-lingwi biex nistudjaw u niddeskrivu it-tipi varji ta’ dawn l-istrutturi u kif jintużaw fil-Malti.

The transfer of a portion of Slovak territory to Hungary under the First Vienna Award brought wit... more The transfer of a portion of Slovak territory to Hungary under the First Vienna Award brought with itself the resurgence of the Slovjak movement, this time under the banner of fraternal society "Ojčizna". Inspired by the Hungarianism of Viktor Dvorčák on one hand and local patriotism on the other, members of the movement viewed themselves as belonging to a separate Slovjak nation which manifested itself mainly through the use of local Eastern Slovak dialects as a written medium.
During the brief wartime resurgence, the literary output of the movement, normally confined to the movement's newspaper “Naša Zastava”, translations of popular novels (mostly from Hungarian) and Dvorčák's poetry was enriched by the participation of Eduard Dobranski, a secondary school teacher. In 1941, Dobranski published "Slovjacka gramatika", a grammar of Slovjak in Slovjak, which he intended to be used as both a descriptive grammar as well as a secondary-level textbook.
Like the vast majority of the written production of the Slovjak movement, Dobranski's grammar has been largely ignored by Slovak dialectologists, save for an occasional snide remark on its alleged low quality (Švagrovský & Ondrejovič 2004:146). However, a close and unbiased examination of “Slovjacka gramatika” reveals both pedagogical and linguistic skill with which it was composed. Moreover, Dobranski’s work provides an important insight into the language standardization laboratory that was the movement in general and the editorial offices of “Naša Zastava” in particular.
This paper presents a reedition of Dobranski’s Grammar with detailed commentary and linguistic analysis providing, whenever necessary, a comparison of Dobranski’s theory with actual usage.

The British Library houses a booklet which is rather unique for at least two reasons: firstly, it... more The British Library houses a booklet which is rather unique for at least two reasons: firstly, it is a printed edition of šarḥ (Judeo-Arabic translation of Jewish Scriptures) of Qohelet, which has until now only been known to exist in manuscripts (cf. Bar-Asher 2010) and secondly, it is one of very few šurūḥ known to be composed in Libya. This paper provides a linguistic analysis of the šarḥ with special focus on comparison with other North African šurūḥ attempting to identify any uniquely Libyan linguistic elements.

Parabiblica Vol. 1 (Mohr Siebeck)

With the publication of the Arabic recension of the Testament of Solomon (henceforth: TestSol(Ar)... more With the publication of the Arabic recension of the Testament of Solomon (henceforth: TestSol(Ar)) and its translation into English, Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala has filled a long neglected lacuna in the study of this pseudepigraphon and its preservation outside of its original Hellenistic cultural and linguistic context. In this paper, we aim to expand on that aspect of Monferrer-Sala’s work by further analyzing the contents and the structure of TestSol(Ar). We particularly focus on its relationship to a little-known Coptic work provisionally titled Legend of Solomon and Thabor and what that relationship can tell us about the transmission and the Sitz im Leben of TestSol(Ar) in Coptic- and Arabic-speaking Egypt.

Conference Presentations by Slavomír Čéplö

New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures – Volume 3, edited by Tony Burke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022

Maltese Linguistics on the Danube, 2020

Arabic and contact-induced change, 2020

More New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, 2019

Perspectives on Maltese Linguistics, Feb 2014

Parabiblica Vol. 1 (Mohr Siebeck)

In Arabic dialectology, the concept of mutual intelligibility is often invoked – whether in posit... more In Arabic dialectology, the concept of mutual intelligibility is often invoked – whether in positive (Ryding 2005:6) or negative terms (Abu-Haidar 2000:93) – to illustrate one claim or another about the nature of the complex phenomenon that is Arabic. Until recently, however, there had not been any rigorous research undertaken to investigate the degree to which varieties of Arabic (either on the level of major regional groupings or within one such group) are mutually intelligible, even though a number of methodologies exist (Gooskens 2013) which have been successfully used to test mutual intelligibility in similarly complex linguistic landscapes such as topolects of Chinese (Tang & Van Heuven 2009).
Last year, a pilot project was launched which seeks to address the lack of meaningful data on mutual intelligibility of Arabic varieties by functionally testing the mutual intelligibility of three dialects of Maghribi Arabic. This paper discusses the methodology used in the project from the selection of test materials and components to testing procedure. Special focus will be given to the issues resulting from the idiosyncratic nature of linguistic variation within Arabic with the aim of establishing a mutual intelligibility testing framework designed to be used across the entire spectrum of varieties of Arabic and to deliver comparable and meaningful data. Additionally, the paper will introduce a software solution developed for the purpose of efficiently administering mutual intelligibility tests in field conditions and the software’s design and use will be briefly discussed in order to elicit feedback.

This paper is a preliminary analysis of a previously unpublished Christian Arabic text entitled A... more This paper is a preliminary analysis of a previously unpublished Christian Arabic text entitled Aḥkām Sulaymān (“Judgements of Solomon”) preserved in two manuscripts – Vaticani arabi 448 (29r-54v) and Bibliothèque Nationale de France Fonds Arabe 214 (186r-203v). A part of the Vatican recension has been identified by Graf and is generally cited as containing an Arabic translation of the Testament of Solomon (TSol), the Paris recension will be discussed here for the first time. It will be shown that Aḥkām Sulaymān does not contain a translation of any known recension of TSol, but is in fact a stand-alone compilation of biblical, pseudepigraphical and legendary material in a narrative describing Solomon’s use of his wisdom and magical knowledge in his role as judge and adjudicator. The paper will examine the structure and content of the work and analyze its connection to the Testament of Solomon as well as other OT Pseudepigrapha. Special attention will be devoted to the relationship between canonical and extra-canonical material combined in this work and its implications for the status of Old Testament pseudepigrapha in Eastern tradition.

Object reduplication is an umbrella term for a number of syntactic phenomena where the lexical ob... more Object reduplication is an umbrella term for a number of syntactic phenomena where the lexical object co-occurs with a co-referential pronominal clitic. Considered one of the hallmarks of the Balkan Sprachbund, this phenomenon has also been described for non-Balkan Romance languages, Berber and Arabic and its existence has been even noted in Maltese, if not always by name. This paper is a first step towards the full account of object reduplication in Maltese.

Paper read at the workshop "Flexible and Multiple Plural Marking in Language Contact and Creolization: Social and Situational Correlates" (ZAS Berlin, 28-29 November), 2022

In this paper, I quantify the variation in plural marking in Naija by analyzing in detail the cho... more In this paper, I quantify the variation in plural marking in Naija by analyzing in detail the choice of plural-marking strategy in the NSC corpus, especially the three most frequent options – dem, -s and Ø, and attempt to describe its regularities. In particular, I use the sociolinguistic and register data collected by the project (see Table 2) combined with computational methods to determine if and to what extent any of the variables can account for the choice.

Paper read at the workshop “Repetition and Ritual, Text and Edition, Challenges and Solutions” (OEAW Vienna, November 24-25), 2022

In this paper, I propose a new approach that is designed to address issues in working with open o... more In this paper, I propose a new approach that is designed to address issues in working with open or fluid manuscript traditions. Inspired by the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index (ATU, see Dundes 1997) which categorizes and catalogues types of folktales across the world, we propose a similar analysis of Christian apocryphal works. Provisionally named the ApocryTrope index, this method aims to break down apocryphal works into their smallest narrative units, classify and categorize them and assign unified representations/codes to them, so as to allow the analysis of the contents of apocryphal works beyond the philological and linguistic.

MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY: LANGUAGE, CULTURE, COGNITION. University of Surrey, 24-25 June 2021, 2021

Receptive multilingualism (RM) is a phenomenon in human communication where the parties involved ... more Receptive multilingualism (RM) is a phenomenon in human communication where the parties involved do not share a language, but they are still able to communicate effectively by virtue of speaking varieties which are close enough in terms of linguistic distance so as to allow for mutual intelligibility (Gooskens 2019). Typical examples include the Nordic countries (i.e. RM between Danish, Norwegian and Swedish; Delsing and Lundin 2005) or Slavic languages (Golubović 2016). In these scenarios, the relationship between the linguistic communities – and thus the level of RM – is generally quite symmetrical, i.e. none of the languages in question is considered more prestigious and/or speakers of one variety are not more likely to have been exposed to the other variety or varieties. There exists, however, another type of RM, one where the converse is true. In this RM scenario (‘RM with one dominant variety’ or RMODV), one of the varieties in question is the dominant one (‘dominant variety’ or DV) and speakers of the other varieties are much more likely to have been exposed to it. Typically, the DV is the language of a politically dominant nation (as with Russian and the rest of the Slavic-speaking world pre-1989) or the variety used by a nation/community that is dominant in a soft way, e.g. quantitatively or culturally (as with Czech and Slovak until very recently). There are two typical and very similar examples of RMODV: the first one, a classic well-established case, involves the intelligibility of Egyptian Arabic (henceforth: EgAr) to speakers of other Arabic varieties. While the mutual intelligibility of Arabic varieties and thus the role of RM in the communication between their speakers is still very much an unexplored field, it is a truth generally acknowledged that the EgAr is the DV in this context. This is not so much due to the sheer number of speakers of EgAr, as it is the effect of Egypt’s cultural dominance as the major producer of TV shows, movies and popular music (Asante 2002: 117). The exposure to this cultural production results in greater familiarity with EgAr all over the Arabic-speaking world and thus asymmetric RM. The other scenario of RMODV is an emerging one and involves the West African varieties of Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles, i.e. Sierra Leone Krio, Ghanaian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin and Nigerian Pidgin/Naija (Yakpo 2021), but also Liberian Kolokwa (own research). The DV in this case is Naija, once again largely due to the population figures and the socioeconomic status of Nigeria, as well as a result of the region being flooded with media production from Nollywood and Nigerian radio broadcasts.
In this paper, I examine these two RMODV scenarios, their sociolinguistic background and their unique nature vis-à-vis other types of RM. In addition to this, I will also propose a method for the functional testing of RMODV that takes into account the context in which RMODV most often takes place, i.e. the passive reception of media. This testing method can be used not only to describe the level of RMODV in the community in question, but it can also serve to measure the influence of RMODV on the mutual intelligibility of the variety in question and DV, as well as account for some of the shortcomings of the standard battery of mutual intelligibility tests (i.e. the lack of consideration of the paralinguistic factors, cf. Gooskens and van der Heuven 2020: 376).

Semitic Dialectology: Crisis and Change. 30 June – 2 June 2021, 2021

It is a truth generally acknowledged that in many languages, there is a special clause type dedic... more It is a truth generally acknowledged that in many languages, there is a special clause type dedicated to expressing the existence or presence (McNally 2011, Givón 2001: 255-262). In Maltese, such clauses feature the pseudoverb hemm and its synonym hawn as their predicate. Little to no attention has been devoted to this structure in descriptions of Maltese syntax (e.g. it is only mentioned in passing in Borg and Azzopardi-Alexander 1997: 60), despite the fact that it features a number of syntactic peculiarities, both expected (the word order, cf. Čéplö 2018: 223-225) and unexpected (such as auxiliary agreement, cf. Čéplö 2018: 110). In addition to existential clauses featuring hemm/hawn as the predicate, there exists another type of existential clauses where the predicate is the present participle qiegħed. These clauses are related to a copular construction featuring the same predicate (Camilleri and Sadler 2020), but to what extent and in what way still remains unclear.
In this paper, I will elaborate on the syntactic and semantic properties of both types of existential clauses in Maltese, including their general typological and areal (comparative) context.

Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics 2021 Summer Meeting, 28 – 30 June 2021, 2021

This paper uses corpus data, primarily that from the NaijaSynCor project, but also those harveste... more This paper uses corpus data, primarily that from the NaijaSynCor project, but also those harvested from the Nairaland Forum, to study the composition, semantics and syntax of lightverb constructions (LVCs) in Naija, an English-lexifier pidgincreole spoken in Nigeria. Employing
the typology and the annotation guidelines of the PARSEME project (Savary et al. 2018), we attempt to disambiguate LVCs from other multi-word expressions and provide a classification of LVCs based on their light verb component and semantic component, while also analyzing their valency and their participation in serial verbs constructions, as well as the influence of the substrates and adstrates on the same.

The slides for the NASSCAL First Friday Workshop, 2020-11-06. A very basic introduction to the hi... more The slides for the NASSCAL First Friday Workshop, 2020-11-06. A very basic introduction to the historical and cultural context of Church Slavic and the apocryphal (and pseudepigraphical) writings preserved in that language.

This dissertation is a quantitative analysis of constituent order (i.e. the order of subject, ver... more This dissertation is a quantitative analysis of constituent order (i.e. the order of subject, verb and object) in contemporary (post-2000) Maltese, a Semitic language descended from North African varieties of Arabic, spoken primarily in the Malta archipelago and Australia. The analysis is based on data collected in two corpora: a general corpus and a syntactically annotated corpus (dependency treebank); the compilation and description of the treebank is the secondary aim of this work.
The dissertation comprises 8 chapters divided into two parts: the first three chapters ofwhich provide a conceptual foundation (chapter 1), a review of existing major approaches to the study of constituent order (chapter 2) and a review of previous works on Maltese constituent order (chapter 3). Using these as the background, chapter 4 then sets the research questions and methodology. The remaining three chapters form the core of the dissertation: chapter 5 describes the composition and enrichment of the general corpus of Maltese. Chapter 6 then provides a thorough description of the Maltese treebank and the annotation decisions, thus in effect assembling a sketch of
Maltese syntax. Chapter 7 contains the actual quantitative analysis of constituent order in Maltese based on the treebank, arriving at the conclusion that the dominant order is SVO or SV/VO and making a detailed case for rejecting previous descriptions of Maltese constituent order as “discourse-configurational”, “topic-prominent” and “free”.
The final chapter summarizes the findings and lays out a number of avenues for further research into the topic.

The Syriac Tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas: A Critical Edition and English Translation, 2017

The Arabic version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is found in two manuscripts: Milan, Biblioteca... more The Arabic version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is found in two manuscripts: Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, G 11 sup, fols. 145r–153v (sig. A) and a fragment in Cairo, Coptic Museum, 6539(D), fol. 188 (sig. B). The text of A was published by Sergio Noja in 1991, preceded by a
French translation published in 1990. For this edition, A has been
reedited from the original manuscript and translated into English.
The text of B has not been published before and this edition is the
first time it is presented to a scholarly audience.

Arabic and contact-induced change, 2020