This paper examines the correlation between word order and affixation as put forward in Greenberg's Universal 27 (1966) for the case of English derivational morphology. A change in word order from OV to VO took place in the Old English period. I hypothesize that the change in syntax is reflected to a certain degree in the derivational morphology of Present Day English. Data from the Penn-Parsed Corpora of Historical English reveal a change in the ratio of prefix and suffix types that hint at a possible syntactic impact on morphology. However, these data of affix types are the first findings of ongoing research that only give us a preliminary view of a possible underlying mechanism. Provided that a correlation does not account for the cause, compounds as a carrier of syntactic information to the word level are discussed as an explanation.