History of the English language

To choose at least 20 language and/or speech phenomena of modern English (from an excerpt of the text I've chosen) and consider them by using the diachronic approach to the language, i.e. their origin and historic development, historic reasons which affect their development.

The chosen phenomena are to be analyzed at lexical, phonetical, grammatical (morphological and syntactical, if possible) levels of the language structure.