Abstract
The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed characterization of the Old English nominal suffix -el and to present a diachronic overview of its development from Proto-Germanic to Early Middle English, including its cognates in other Germanic languages. This heavily polysemous suffix was used to derive a plethora of deverbal nouns ranging from agentive to abstract meanings (e.g. fæfel "player" x fyndel "finding"), but already in the Early Middle English period it ceased to exist, and its functions were taken over by other suffixes.
The paper will attempt to look at the reasons for this demise. As most of the research into lexical productivity of Old English affixes focuses on those surviving until Present-Day English, this paper tries to cover, at least partly, the understudied area of one Old English suffix which is no longer productive.
Based on the data from the Dictionary of Old English and the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, the research attempts to describe the grammatical and semantic properties of the bases and derivatives of the suffix and its productivity in Old English. Attention is also paid to the changes in the typological framework between Old and Middle English.