This paper examines the morphological and semantic aspects of the Old English suffix -lic in adjectives deriving from verbal stems(infinitive stems, present and past participle stems). As the deverbal base stems of the adjectives are adjectival in nature, the addition of the suffix -lic to them does not change their word class. Therefore, it seems that the formation of deverbal adjectives by means of -lic suffixation is morphologically redundant. Previous research shows that the suffix imposes the potential meaning of ABLE to its base stem and that the sense of passivity also occurs in some -lic deverbal derivatives(McIntosh 1991, Dalton-Puffer 1997). The results of my corpus-based quantitative study reveal that even though it is true the major meaning of the suffix is the sense of ABLE, the semantic picture of the deverbal suffix -lic is diversified by the existence of several minor meanings as well as by the presence of some instances where the suffix carries no meaning. In addition, I show that the passive meaning is not contributed by the addition of the suffix or by the type of participles but rather it should be seen as a modal implication co-occurring with some lexical meaning of -lic dervatives.
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