English nominalizations in /-s/

The morphology of English words like dependence, linguistics, and news suggests that English has an /-s/ suffix forming certain kinds of abstract nouns not used as plurals. While dependence and dependents are homophones, the former takes singular verb agreement, as do linguistics and news, and the latter takes plural. We argue that English has a highly productive derivational suffix /-s/ that creates abstract nouns from adjectives, dependence from dependent+ /-s/, linguistics from linguistic+ /-s/, and news from new+/-s/. While this suffix originated in the Latin present participle, the sources of a modern /-s/ came into English through extensive borrowing from Latin and French as well as through loan translation and borrowing of Greek words, but then it combined with existing English /-s/ that marked plural or genitive. Orthographic, phonological, morphological, and semantic evidence suggests that this modern /-s/ arose from several distinct sources that came together as a single suffix in the early 17th century.