 Hello and welcome. In order to understand the morphological patterns of a language, it is sometimes useful to consider the diachronic aspect of morphology, that is, how morphological patterns change over time. In this e-lecture we will look at types of morphological change before in subsequent e-lectures we will deal with morphological changes in present-day English and the resulting consequences of those changes. There are numerous labels to distinguish the types of morphological change. A good deal of morphological modification appears to follow from phonological processes. For example, as shown here, the weakening of the old English case system and the subsequent fixing of word order to subject verb object seems to have its source in the phonological reduction of the final syllables in polysyllabic words and eventually it led to a fixing of word order. In old English, root syllables were heavily stressed and all other syllables were weakened. As a result, final vowels were first weakened too, that is, they were realized as schwa and final nasals were lost. Even though the structural details of morphological change are language specific, generalizations can be made that reflect the patterns of morphological processes. The following processes can be distinguished. Pattern loss, coalescence, analogical change, reanalysis and some further changes. Let us look at these processes of morphological change in more detail and let's start with pattern loss. Sometimes languages may lose entire patterns, which in turn means that all words formed by this pattern disappear. This applies primarily to inflection. For example, as shown here, we find cases that exist in Latin in its modern romance successor languages such as Italian or Spanish. Furthermore, it may happen that two formerly free elements combine to a new word. There are two variants of this coalescence. Univabation is one of them, where both elements are non-oxiliery resulting in a compound as shown in this Swedish example. Well, the second type of coalescence is referred to as grammaticalization, where one of the coalescing elements is a semantically abstract auxiliary. In fact, many morphological patterns seem to go back to syntactic phrases with auxiliary words and are thus examples of grammaticalization. For example, it is plausible and it is a good hypothesis that the English past tense suffix ed goes back to the auxiliary form did. However, since this change must have occurred more than two thousand years ago, it may nevertheless be highly speculative. Here is another type of morphological change, analogical change. The most noticeable way in which morphological systems change is known as analogy. In this process, irregular patterns are restructured in accordance with the regular patterns that already exist in the language. For example, in the verb system of English, several of the irregular verbs have fallen under the influence of regular verbs during the last thousand years and they have been remodeled by means of analogy with forms such as walk and walked. Two types of analogical change can be distinguished. One is referred to as extension. It occurs in inflection as well as in derivational morphology. In both cases, existing patterns are extended to new leg seams. For example, the forms stick and stuck are extended to dig and dug or changeable is extended to washable. The second type of analogical change is referred to as levelling and analogical levelling occurs when a type of morphological alternation is eliminated and the paradigm is thus levelled. Examples are those paradigms in a language that do not contain the maximum amount of differentiation anymore, as you see in these examples from German and present-day English. In fact, some paradigms have so few distinctions as to make the entire group virtually useless in distinguishing function in sentences. Reanalysis, further morphological change, creates new morphological patterns in two ways. One is referred to as back formation and here new formations become possible after a complex word has been associated with new morphological patterns as in edit or televised. The other reanalysis type is referred to as secretion and here former root elements such as a holic which comes from alcoholic may be turned into new affixes. With its new affix new leg seams can be formed not by blending but by means of affixation. For example, tobacco holic or mariana holic and so on. In present-day English secretion seems to be becoming increasingly common. Well and over and above the main types of morphological change there are further changes which may have lost their original origin. For example, the German umlaut, you know where front and back vowels meet. The German umlaut was once phonologically conditioned. Today this rule has ceased to be purely phonological. It now accompanies particular morphological patterns and is used productively. For example in German diminutive forms such as fussfüßchen or kussküßchen. Well, having defined the types of morphological change which you can see here as a summary we can now proceed and look at the changes in particular languages as well as the consequences of these morphological changes. However, we will do that in a separate e-lecture. Until then, have a nice time.