Our study addresses the diachronic development of combining forms in English scientific
texts over approximately 350 years, from the early stages of the first scholarly journals that
were published in English to contemporary English scientific publications. Combining forms
as bound lexical morphemes (eg lith (o)-/-lith, graph (o)-/-graph, bio-,-lysis) share some
similarities with affixes and, at the same time, with base lexemes and parts of regular
compounds. They seem to have always played a particularly important and productive role …

This paper addresses the diachronic development of combining forms in English scientific
texts over approximately 350 years, from the early stages of the first scholarly journals that
were published in English to contemporary English scientific publications. In this paper a
critical discussion of the category of combining forms is presented and a case study is
produced to examine the role of selected combining forms in two diachronic English
corpora.