The range of EModE inflexions is almost identical with that of PrE. This fact was particularly striking for grammarians who compared English with the highly inflected Latin language (T27/78–9, “it wanteth Grammer”). Whereas inflexion had a great number of forms and functions in OE and ME, continuous levelling and loss of endings now made it necessary to express some syntactical functions by other means (cf. 6.4).

Nouns: pluralization (Graband 1965: 39–102)

The EModE system is almost identical with that of PrE. The unstressed [ə] of the [əz] ending was lost (except after sibilants) in the fifteenth century; this, along with subsequent assimilation to preceding voiceless consonants, resulted in the modern allomorphs of the regular plural morpheme {s} = [iz, z, s]. However, Hart' careful transcriptions (1570) show that there was still a great deal of variation, and the modern regularity of phonemically conditioned allomorphs of {s} – and in {d} of the regular past tense formation (5.6.2) – came about only in the seventeenth century (cf. Lass, forthcoming).

As in PrE, allomorphic variation of fricatives was restricted to a few words:/f ∼ v/, as in loaf, alternated in a dozen frequent words, some six had /θ ∼ ð/ alternation, but /s ∼ z/ is found only in house.