This is the first study of the typological change of English from a synthetic towards an
analytic language that focuses exclusively on the lexical domain of the language. It presents
an innovative approach to linguistic typology by focusing on the different encoding techniques
used in the lexicon providing a theoretical framework for the description of structural types
(synthetic analytic) and encoding techniques (fusional isolating agglutinative
incorporating) found in the lexicon of a language.It is argued that in the case of English
the change from syntheticity to analyticity did not only affect its inflectional system and the
encoding of grammatical information but also the derivational component. Based on a cognitive
approach to derivation the book provides empirical evidence for a considerable decline in the
use of synthetic structures and a trend towards higher degrees of analyticity in a specific
lexical domain of English the formation of nouns by means of derivation. The full extent of
this change surfaced during the transition from Old English to early Middle English but it was
later partly reversed though influence from French. The typological shift was thus the result
of a global structural reorganization of the language that resulted in a fundamental change of
the structure of words. The book also presents a comprehensive account of the historical
development of nominal derivation from the beginnings of Old English until the end of the early
Middle English period. Based on empirical data from written sources the study documents the
frequency of use of all Germanic-based derivational morphemes for nominalizations over
different subperiods and discusses their origin as well as important changes of their semantic
and morphological properties.
