Abstract
Studying the complex interaction between phonological and morphological developments involved in the extensive reorganisation of nominal inflection in early English, we focus, primarily, on new inflectional endings that emerged by analogy in etymologically suffix-less paradigm forms of r-stems and root nouns. We argue that the analogical changes were essentially reactive to phonological developments, and to a large extent predictable in statistical terms. Investigating correlations in corpus data, we identify the factors that affected the probability that new analogical endings were adopted. The predictors of the directions of analogical change that we show to be robust include the syllable structure of the root, the salience of inherited and analogical inflectional markers, as well as their absolute and relative frequencies.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers as well as to the editors of the volume for their insightful remarks and comments, which helped to improve the quality of the paper. We would like to thank especially one of the anonymous reviewers for her/his suggestions on the revision of the section on phonological structure.
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