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Typological characteristics of the English language present a serious linguistic problem. Some linguists, for example, Vladimir Dmitrievich Arakin, describe it as basically an inflecting language, while others, for example, Vladimir Skalichka, as basically an isolating language.
These disagreements reflect the fact, that the typological system of the English language underwent a drastic typological reconstruction in its history, so the diachronic typological description of English should be distinguished from its synchronic description. Old English, like all the other Indo-European languages, was of the inflecting type. It had a developed system of noun declension and verbal subjugation, and there was obligatory concord between the noun and other words in the sentence. During the Middle English period due to the reduction of the unstressed inflections most of the morphological synthetic forms were lost, the morphological paradigms were reduced and only a few productive grammatical patterns have remained. They are: the plural form of the nouns, e.g., cat – cats, the genitive case of the noun, e.g., cat –cat’s, the 3d person singular form of the verb in the present tense, e.g., work – works, the past tense forms of the verbs, e.g., work – worked. These grammatical suffixes have lost their inflectional properties and have become essentially agglutinative: they no longer combine different grammatical functions and are no longer fused with the roots (or stems) like in Russian; the borderlines between the morphemes are clear and transparent. The direction of the assimilation between the stem and the affixes has changed from predominantly regressive (like in other inflecting languages) to progressive, resembling the agglutinative phenomenon of vowel and consonant harmony: the morphemes –(e)s and –(e)d are phonetically adjusted to the final consonant of the stem; they are syntagmatically realized in three allomorphs, cf.: cats, dogs, roses; worked, lived, lasted. To compensate for the extinct synthetic morphological forms, the English language has developed a number of analytical grammatical forms, including the article determination of the noun, the time, aspect, voice and mood forms of the verb.
The reduction of the morphological formal features has lead to an almost complete loss of essentially inflectional ways of syntactic linking - agreement (or concord) and government; agreement can be traced in Modern English only as a recessive typological feature in the combinations of the noun with the demonstrative pronouns, e.g.: this book – these books, and in the predicative combinations of the noun with the third person singular form of the verb in the present tense, e.g.: they say – he says; government can be traced in the combination of the verb with objective pronouns, e.g.: to see him. Semantic concord in Modern English prevails over the formal concord, which is evident in predicative variants like the following: the family is gathered around the table (the subject referent is presented as an indivisible whole) – the family are gathered around the table (the subject referent is presented as potentially divisible). Formal agreement and government have been replaced by purely syntactic (or analytical) ways of word linking: adjunction (adjoining, or mere juxtaposition of words) and the use of connectors. This resulted in a greater importance of word order as a means of semantics rendering, cf.: silk blouse – blouse silk (the change of word order influences the meaning of the whole phrase).
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