The historical sources of English word formation

Introduction

We do not attempt to summarize the whole history of the English language. Instead, I will concentrate on just those aspects of its history over the past thousand years or so that help to account for some of the peculiarities of word formation in contemporary English. In derivational morphology, history sheds light in particular on the distribution of free and bound roots, and on the differences in ‘productivity’ (especially as regards neologisms). In inflectional morphology, what is striking is the transformation of English from a language with elaborate inflectional morphology (some individual lexemes having a dozen or more forms) to one in which inflection plays a much more limited role.