Natural Morphology and the loss of Nominal Inflections in English

This book aims to provide an analysis of the loss of nominal inflections in English. Despite the fact that the loss of inflections in English is taken into account in all historical grammars and in all histories of the language, it is often dealt with rather superficially, and the typological shift from synthetic to analytic that the language underwent is commonly considered to be the result of sociolinguistic factors, and systemic reasons are often neglected. In this work, instead, emphasis is given to internal factors, since, according to the author, the dynamics of the language as a complex system were the main reason for the changes discussed here, and contact seems to have only accelerated processes which had been in progress for centuries. Moreover, the author suggests a new classification of Old English (and Middle English) nominal classes, since so far scholars have used the Germanic thematic formative as the basic criterion, although in Old English this was absolutely no longer recognisable. This totally new classification is based on the parameters of Natural Morphology (NM), and one of the aims of this book is to provide an application of this theory to diachronic issues