Lecture 5: Some Theoretical Problems of English Adjectives and Adverbs. Outline

1. The Category of Degrees of Comparison of Adjectives

2. The Syntactic Process of Substantivization of Adjectives

3. The “Stone Wall” Problem

1) The Category of Degrees of Comparison of Adjectives.

The only morphological category of the English adjectives and adverbs is the degrees of comparison. It is established on the basis of the gradual opposition: e.g. brave – braver – the bravest.

The category denotes different intensity of some property when comparing some objects possessing this property. This morphological category makes up the nucleus of the functional semantic field of comparison.

When speaking about the number of degrees of comparison, some scholars recognize 2 degrees: comparative and superlative, while others speak of 3 degrees – positive, comparative and superlative.

The authors of the first opinion say that forms like “brave”, “slow” do not imply any comparison, they only name some property without specifying the degree of its intensity. So they do not recognize the positive degree.

But if the forms “braver”, “the bravest” are opposed to “brave”, then all three of them make up one paradigm and the first member of it should be termed somehow. Hence, the appeared the notion of the positive degree.

It is well-known that not all the adjectives have this morphological category. Adjectives are subdivided into qualitative and relative. Relative adjectives denote some property through their relation to some object: wood – wooden, child – childish, water - watery.

Qualitative adjectives denote some inherent property of an object which may be presented as different in its amount or intensity.

So, only qualitative adjectives are characterized by the morphological category of the degrees of comparison. But even some of them lack this category if they denote a property which can hardly be presented as different in its amount or intensity: middle, pliant, dead, wounded, deaf, etc.

However, occasionally and in stylistically marked cases even such adjectives may be used in the comparative or superlative degree For example, in Hemingway’s novel “A Farewell to Arms” we can read: “You cannot be deader than dead. Todd is the deadest of them all”.

The degree of intensity of some property may be expressed morphologically and then we speak of the morphological category of the degrees of comparison, or lexically.

Morphological means include inflexions: /er/, for the comparative degree and /est/ for the superlative degree. We should also refer here a close group of suppletive forms: good – better – best; bad – worse – worst.

Some adjectives have two parallel forms in the comparative and superlative degrees but they differ in their meanings:

far – farther – farthest (distance);

further – furthest;

near – nearer – nearest (distance);

next (order);

late – later – latest (time);

latter – last (order);

old – older – oldest (age);

elder – eldest (age order in family relations when the adjectives are used in the attributive function).

e.g. She is my elder sister. She is five years older than I.

The idea of comparison cam also be expressed on the syntactic level with the help of lexical means including “more” and “most”.

It is worth mentioning that most adverbs can express the degree of intensity both morphologically and with the help of “more” and “most”.

e.g. quickly – quicker (more quickly).

Morphological means of expressing the degrees of comparison are restricted in their usage:

1. only monosyllabic qualitative adjectives can take them.

2. bi-syllabic adjectives ending in –y, -ow, -er, -re, -ble can take them.

3. bi-syllabic adjectives which have the stress on the 2^nd syllable like “complete”, “concise” etc.

As for the rest adjectives, they do not take any inflexions, but then there arises the problem of the phrases like “more” and “most beautiful”.

Traditionally they are treated as analytical forms of the degrees of comparison in which more and most are treated as auxiliaries.

The authors of this opinion proceed principally from the plane of content and are influenced by the parallelism in the meaning of the units like “braver - bravest” and “more beautiful – most beautiful.”

So the semantic principle predominates in this opinion. However if we accept this point of view why not consider such word-combinations as “very beautiful’, “extremely beautiful” as analytical forms of degrees of comparison, because in the final analysis such word-combinations also express some degree of intensity of the property. On the other hand, why not treat as analytical forms such word combinations as “many people, more people, most people” where some comparison is also expressed.

Answering this question we deal with the first argument in favour of rejecting the idea of analytical forms of the degrees of comparison of adjectives. The matter is that the first component “more” or “most” is syntactically significant and lexically meaningful what is foreign to analytical forms.

“More” and “most” have the same lexical meaning when they are combined with adjectives and when they are combined with nouns which have no analytical forms: more beautiful, more snow.

Hence, there should exist some syntactic relations between the components of such phrases, which are of quantitative nature, and that is foreign to analytical forms.

e.g. a bit more beautiful, much more beautiful.

Moreover, “more’ and “most” can function independently, preserving the same meaning, e.g. I like it more.

We should also stress that “more” and “most” are the morphological forms of the degrees of comparison “much” and “many”.

So if we treat “more beautiful” as an analytical form of the comparative degree then we are bound to accept that in this word the comparative degree is expressed twice, that is on the level of the “auxiliary” component and on the level of the whole phrase and that awakes doubts.

Hence, such word combinations should sooner be treated as free word combinations in which the adverb is used as a quantifier to the adjective while the adjective itself is an attribute to some noun.

Thus, the morphological category of degrees of comparison exists but it is characteristic of rather a limited group of qualitative adjectives. The greater bulk of English adjectives express difference in the degree of intensity of some property with the help of lexical means on the syntactic level.