English nouns since 1150: a typological study

A Typological Study combines nouns with a typological approach, outlining an empirically grounded, diachronically delved, and reasonably comprehensive account of how and why English nouns changed over 850 years.It aims to remedy the lack of typological perspective and quantification in the lexical domain, with the objective to trace the typological development of the English nouns based on quantified data for the time from 1150 to 2000.The study falls squarely within the trend of investigating English evolution applying corpus-driven methodology, offering empirical insights into the extending process and structure of the nominal lexicon.The book consists of thirteen chapters.Excluding the introducing chapter (Chapter 1), it is organized into four parts: "Part I: Morphological typology and the English lexicon" (Chapters 2-3), "Part II: Means to extend the nominal lexicon since 1150" (Chapters 4-6), "Part III: Typological profile of the nominal data since 1150" (Chapters 7-10), and "Part IV: Discussion and conclusion" (Chapters 11-13).The first chapter sets the scene by examining the typological profile of English, addressing two key issues: five processes are employed to extend the nominal wordstock and speakers have chosen techniques to enlarge the lexicon in accordance with the typological profile of their word-stock.Part 1 reviews previous research and prepares the concepts for the remainder of the book.Chapter 2 offers a brief introduction to morphological typology.Language types are classified as analytic or synthetic, also categorized as isolating, agglutinating, or fusional.Analytic languages, equated with isolating, are featured in oneto-one correspondence between morpheme and word.Synthetic languages utilize both agglutinating and fusional techniques to merge morphemes into single words, which is achieved by rich inflectional systems.As languages develop over time, they are roughly prone to move around a typological circle: isolating to agglutinating, fusional, back to isolating, and so on (Dixon 1997).Based on these basic ideas, Chapter 3 is narrowed to derivation and the typological shifts in the English lexicon from Old English to Middle English.There are four typological parameters in the lexical domain: status of the base, lexical strata, morphophonemic alternations, and affix