Morphological Relatedness and the Typology of Adjectival Formations in Old English

Abstract

This article addresses the question of the types of morphological relatedness that the lexical class of the adjective presents in Old English. After an exhaustive analysis of the derivational paradigms of the language based on data retrieved from the lexical database of Old English Nerthus, the following conclusions are reached. Two types of morphological relatedness are identifiable, namely explicit and implicit. Short distance and long distance relations overlap with explicit and implicit morphological relatedness. These relations involve four types of units, to wit lexical primes (the bases of lexical paradigms), derived adjectives (the input to recursive processes of word-formation), target adjectives (the output of processes that cannot be inputted to a recursive process) and morphologically unrelated adjectives (which are neither the input nor the output of a process of word-formation). © 2016 Society for Studia Neophilologica.