summary english isolating lg linguist list vol6 1095 aug 7 95 asked following question received 3 responses readers want say thank much alan juffs steve matthews john j mccarthy summary dear collegues sometimes heard english becoming isolating language inflecting one typologically would like know discussion aboout phenomena actual evidences explain argument comment references alan juffs juffs isp pitt edu might look len talmy work considers english satellite framed language however numerous verbs english also quash lot meaning root might also consider looking levin rappaport unaccusatives causativity levin b rappaport hovav 1995 unaccusativity syntaxlexical semantics interface cambridge mit press levin b rappaport hovav 1994 preliminary analysis causative verbs english l gleitman b landau eds lexicon acquisition pp 3580 cambridge mit press talmy l 1985 lexicalization patterns semantic structure lexical patterns shopen eds language typology syntactic description pp 57149 cambridge cambridge university press talmy l 1991 path realization typology event conflation proceedings berkeley linguistics society 17 references comments steve matthews matthews hkucc hku hk useful discussion loss inflectional morphology first 2 chapters john hawkins comparative typology english german describes english retained proper subset morphology german p 12 although nt appeal directly isolating typology points could taken illustrate claim mention also useful discussion morphological types andrew carstairs mccarthy current morphology comments john j mccarthy jmccarthy linguist umass edu reason english said changed inflecting isolating language primarily loss case marking nouns except pronouns loss person number marking verbs except 3rd person singular present verb