Abstract
ABSTRACT The suffix -ful, in words like hopeful and wonderful, originates in the adjective full, from whence it seems to have undergone grammaticalisation. In Present-day English, the morphological differences between these two items are marked by their orthography: in addition to losing its free-word status, -ful also simplified the digraph <ll> to <l>. Although the current orthographic configuration of these items reveals the interplay between spelling and morphology, there arise some questions regarding the process leading up to it, especially when considering the orthographic instability of the Middle and Early Modern periods. This article thus studies the selection of the spelling variants <full> and <ful> over time in order to shed some light on their distribution and standardisation. Adopting a corpus-based approach that draws data from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, the analyses of intra- and extralinguistic phenomena ultimately point to speakers as the enablers of regularisation in this very instance.
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