Abstract This paper investigates the historical development during the past three centuries of the English suffix -en, used to create denominal adjectives (e.g. golden, silken), focusing on words that have remained in the language until the present day. We specify a way of calculating the rate of loss of the suffix and apply this to different lexical items involved in this process. Finally, we explore the roles of word frequency and collocations, in order to shed some light on how these factors relate to the loss of a linguistic form.

中文翻译：

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英语后缀-en的历史发展

摘要 本文研究了过去三个世纪以来英语后缀-en 的历史发展，用于创建命名形容词（例如golden、silken），重点关注直到今天仍保留在该语言中的单词。我们指定了一种计算后缀丢失率的方法，并将其应用于此过程中涉及的不同词汇项。最后，我们探讨了词频和搭配的作用，以阐明这些因素与语言形式丧失的关系。