Conclusion: history and structure

Characteristics of a language that are due purely to historical accident are the characteristics that, in principle, are least likely to interest a general linguist. The Norman conquest in 1066 is just such an accident, so its consequences for the vocabulary of English (the massive medieval intake of words from French) may seem to deserve a place only in histories of the English language, not in books (such as this) about its morphological structure. But there is more to it than that. If it had not been for the Norman conquest and its aftermath, English morphology would not have acquired the at first sight rather bewildering mix of characteristics evident. What’s more, one cannot dismiss characteristics acquired through the Latin lexical intake as ‘unproductive’ and therefore not truly part of modern English morphology; for, some Latin-derived processes, such as suffixation of -ion and -ence, are in limited domains just as formally regular as processes such as adverb formation with -ly. If the history of the community of English speakers in the British Isles had been otherwise, the English language would be considerably different today not just in its repertoire of lexical items but in how its words are structured.