Derivation in Middle English

Focusing on deadjectival and denominal formations, this study traces developments in the frequenqy and productivity of twelve abstract-noun forming suffixes of Germanic and Romance origin on the basis of selected corpora, including the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, the Middle English Grammar Corpus and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. The study reveals that during the period under investigation the suffixes are not differentiated semantically in a systematic manner; rather, the occurrence of a particular suffix can be influenced by stylistic factors such as rhyme or structural parallelism and generally reflects the suffix usage typical of a specific region and/or text type at a particular point in time.