This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English morphology, focusing on inflection. Beside a largely synchronic account of the nominal and verbal morphology in the individual historical periods, the chapter explains the underlying mechanisms and motivations behind morphological developments pertinent to individual stages. These include changes such as loss of inflections, transformation of case, number and gender systems, or the restructuring of the formal marking of tense and mood. The typological drift which English experienced over the last 1300 years stays central to the discussion, as does language contact with Celtic, Norse and Norman French, whose role as a potential catalyst for morphological changes will be explored. The discussion emphasises the dynamic nature of the morphological system and the continuity of the processes involved in its gradual transformation over the centuries.

This contribution surveys various large-scale quantitative techniques that have been utilized in the literature on varieties and dialects of English to determine their typological relatedness: (a) aggregative measures of distance or similarity, based on atlas or survey data; (b) typological profiling, a technique that draws on naturalistic text corpora to calculate usage- and frequency-based measures of grammatical analyticity and syntheticity; (c) a corpus-based method, inspired by work in information theory, that is designed to map out varieties based on how they differ in terms of language/dialect complexity: and (d) an approach to calculate distances between varieties as a function of the extent to which grammatical variation patterns in usage data are dissimilar.

Linguistic typology is concerned with classifying human languages and with identifying structural similarities and differences between these languages. Dialectology is the study of typically vernacular and regionally restricted and/or distinctive forms of language. Dialect typology focuses on the intersection between typology and dialectology. In this chapter, we (1) review the set of language-external factors (variety type, world region, exposure to contact) that has been used to categorize World Englishes, (2) summarize the literature about (vernacular) universals, angloversals, and related notions in World Englishes, and (3) discuss work on parameters of structural diversity in World Englishes (analyticity versus syntheticity, complexity versus simplicity).