Drawing on a wide array of historical and contemporary corpora, this article provides one of the first empirical analyses of the intricately related functional changes that -ish underwent in the course of English language history. By investigating the distribution of -ish formations, the analysis sheds light on the productivity of the suffix, which does not only become evident in the numerous hapax legomena, but also in the trajectory of change itself in which -ish occurs with ever new base categories and new functions. Moreover, the article revisits theoretical claims made in the literature about the diachronic development and synchronic properties of -ish and reassesses them in the light of the corpus-based observations.

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The term end-weight refers to the tendency for bulkier constituents to occur at the end of sentences. While end-weight has occasionally been analysed as a more general short-before-long principle in the sense of Behaghel's (1909–10) Law of Growing Constituents, the operation of end-weight in absolute sentence-final position has until recently lacked empirical verification. This article shows that end-weight effects can be observed in grammatical variation contexts in which language users have a choice between variants that differ in terms of length and degree of explicitness. Using two variation phenomena as a testing ground, we empirically investigate the hypothesis that the more explicit and hence bulkier variant occurs preferably in final position. The first variation context concerns semi-reflexive verbs that can take either an explicitself-pronoun or a zero variant. It turns out that the rapid decline of theself-pronoun is delayed in end position. The second case study focuses on Early Modern English affirmative declarative clauses, which may alternate between finite verb forms ordo-supported ones. This study reveals thatdo-support is favoured in end position. These findings ultimately contribute to an empirical validation of end-weight, the implications of which are discussed against the backdrop of processing-related support strategies.

German -isch and English -ish share a common Germanic origin, which is evidenced by striking similarities concerning the derivation of ethnic adjectives (englisch/English) or property-denoting adjectives (kindisch/childish). However, after an initial period of parallel characteristics, the two languages display drastic changes, with English developing an approximative sense when attached to adjectival bases (e.g. greenish) and expanding to a wide range of other word categories, while German -isch develops multiple functions and also comes to firmly occupy a morphological niche with non-native bases. The paper sheds light on the evolving divergence between German and English by presenting results from two diachronic corpus-based studies. Additionally, explanations with respect to the typological parameter of ‘Boundary Permeability’ are provided.

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