No comprehensive study of Early Middle English derivation has been published thus far. This
book is an attempt to remedy the situation at least to give a detailed analysis of one class
of suffixes i.e. seven suffixes forming abstract nouns. They are both of native (-d m
-s(c)hipe(e) -h d(e) and -nes(se)) and French origin (-age -(e)rie and -ment). The analysis
includes the semantics of the suffixes both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective as
well as their productivity and dialect distribution. The study is data-oriented hence the
analysis of linguistic facts is dominating. The analysed material comes from the Dictionary of
Old English (A-F) based on the Toronto Corpus of Old English Texts the Toronto Corpus and the
Middle English Dictionary on-line. The unique features of the study are the account of the
senses of the suffixes in Old and Early Middle English and the semantic evolution of the
native suffixes from Old to Early Middle English as well as the demonstration that some of the
French suffixes were productive already in Early Middle English.
