Explaining the variability of adjective comparatives and superlatives: entering the twenty-first century

Abstract

There has been no lack of research on the variation of comparative adjective forms in contemporary English, but our understanding of comparison strategies is still limited, with respect to individual patterns of adjectives, as well as sociolinguistic factors (e.g. formality). This article presents a quantitative investigation of selected disyllabic adjectives in comparison (i.e. ample, bitter, common, complete, costly, deadly, empty, friendly, kindly, likely, obscure, remote, robust, severe, simple, sober, wealthy), based on the 2001–2005 issues of two different types of newspapers in British English (i.e. Daily Mail and The Independent). Our analysis reveals that, although previous studies have shown that some factors have an effect on the comparative alternation between the inflectional and periphrastic forms (e.g. costlier and more costly, respectively), these factors do not affect all adjectives equally. We also found that, for many adjectives, periphrastic comparison is more likely to be preferred in the less formal newspaper (i.e. Daily Mail). The present study also explores the strategies employed when selecting comparative forms for superlative adjectives and shows that factors which are influential on the comparative formation are not always effective on the superlative comparison.

Keywords:

• adjective comparison
• inflectional and periphrastic forms
• individual patterns of adjectives
• formality
• newspaper language
• British English

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 An earlier and seminal version of this paper was presented at the 2018 LSK (Linguistic Society of Korea) Conference, Kyung Hee University, Seoul. We are grateful to the audience for their comments and suggestions.

2 The parentheses refer to the identification of the source (see Section 3) and the publication year.

3 See: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.

4 Leech and Culpeper (1997: 363–64) treat remote separately from other stress-final adjectives, stating that it occurs with both types of comparative forms. Still, their statistics show that the periphrastic comparison is twice as frequent as the inflectional one with this adjective.

5 Mondorf (2009: 89) refers to Givón’s (1991: 87) maxim of the quantity principle, which runs as follows: “Less predictable information will be given more coding material.”

6 Although we are aware that the minor stress pattern of robust produces initial stress, it is impossible to tell in our data which examples yield which pattern. In any case, this adjective does not seem to behave as the odd-one-out in this group, which is more significant for the purpose of this paper.