The Derivational Suffixes and Suffixoids of Old Saxon: A Panchronic Approach to a Linguistic Category

A survey of the literature on Old Saxon derivational suffixes and suffixoids does not yield a neat and clear-cut picture of forms. The reason is that some researchers take a diachronic view of the data, while others take a synchronic view. In this article I recommend apanchronicview of the data in hopes of clarifying the situation. As part of the discussion I argue that affixoids are a good example of grammaticalization. I thus also discuss and—as far as research on German is concerned—aim to resurrect the notion of AFFIXOID as a linguistic category. If successful, the results of this paper may be applied to other languages.