Adjective comparison in contemporary English in contemporary English Adjective comparison
DECLARATION I certify that this thesis is my own work and effort, it is originally written by me under strict guidance of my supervisor The support I have received in my work and the preparation of the minor thesis itself has been acknowledged In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the minor thesis’s references ACKNOWLEDGEMENT For the completion of this thesis, I have been fortunate to receive invaluable contributions from many people I would like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisor,………… who step by step guides me during my writing thesis Without his assistance, excellent suggestions, expert advice and detailed critical comments, the work could not have been completed I owe his for a debt of gratitude that cannot be measured In addition, I am greatly indebted to all my lecturers at ………….(Eg:Faculty of Foreign Languages at Hanoi Pedagogical University No.2, Vinh Phuc), for their useful lectures, support, encouragement and for inspiring me the love for English foreign language teaching and doing scientific research Besides, the study couldn’t have been prepared without the support and the provision of useful materials from my friends Therefore, their kindness will never be forgotten Finally, although great efforts have been made to complete the thesis, I am aware that this study is far from perfect Hence, constructive comments are welcome for more perfection of the thesis TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES DIAGRAM CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale Language is very important means of communication in daily human life Human beings use language, both in written and spoken forms, to express their ideas Nowadays, English is considered as one of the most popular language for everyone all over the world There are many problems in learning English as listening, speaking, reading, writing, Grammar, lexicology, etc Grammar plays a very important role in English, it is not easy for English learners to study Moreover, learners are affected by their mother tongue during the process of studying that cause much confusion to them However, it is not so difficult that English learners can not study because English grammar is also systematic In grammar, Adjective is one of essential parts of speech to form a sentence Adjective is frequently used in daily life such as describing things, objects,… or expressing feeling, emotion, etc As well known, English adjectives are diversified in many forms, meanings as well as usages It takes learners quite a long time to understand grammar deeply, especially adjectives It therefore seems that the semantic and syntactic function of adjectives are still too difficult for students So I researches Adjective comparison in contemporary English with the hope that the my graduation paper will contribute a small part on enriching the source of materials, and it hopes that students be able to further understand about semantic and syntactic function of English adjectives as well as partly avoid making errors when studying these matters In the my point of view in order to use English effectively, studying grammar is essential requirement because English Grammar is one of the most difficult subject It is said that study of English grammar could improve the ability of rest skills like listening, speaking, reading, writing, … Mastering English grammar helps us to use the language correctly and effectively That is why I chooses studying English grammar for the graduation paper, particularly adjectives in English I decided to a study focusing on Adjective comparison in contemporary English I hopes that this thesis will be helpful for the learners in their studying and after reading the graduation paper, many students will be interested in searching and developing this topic in order that the matter of semantic and syntactic function of English adjectives will be clearer and more well-provided than those presented in the graduation paper 1.2 Aims of the study There are three main aims of the research: Firstly, to examine how adjectives in English are compared today Secondly, to determine how well the descriptions in modern grammars agree with how adjectives are compared in authentic written English Thirdly, to see whether there have been any recent changes in the way of indicating comparison It will be a quantitative study 1.3 Scope of the study The general research area of this study is adjective comparison in contemporary English The phenomenon is the syntactic functions of adjectives in English in comparison with other periods Others relating to the functions of adjectives are also briefly mentioned 1.4 Methods of the study This study mainly based on scientific theories about English adjectives, the writer has to collect materials and finds the most suitable ones to systematize as well as analyze them The main methods of the graduation paper are: Firstly, descriptive method is used to describe and make a general overview of English adjectives in terms of their semantic and syntactic functions Secondly, statistic method is used to gather information about English adjectives, apart from that giving the study point of view of this thesis Finally, contrastive analysis method is used to make a comparison between English adjectives and other periods equivalents 1.5 Structure of the study To gain the above goals, the graduation paper is divided into five chapters and a reference Chapter I is the introduction, including the reasons for choosing the title, aims and objectives, scope, methods and structure of the study Chapter II introduces an overview of Adjective comparison in contemporary English Chapter III is a study to methods of the title Chapter IV is discussion about Adjective comparison in contemporary English Chapter V is the conclusion part, gives brief finding of all the above sections and references come at the end of the graduation paper CHAPTER 2: OVERVIEW OF ADJECTIVE COMPARISON IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH 2.1 Overview of Adjective comparison It is now a commonplace that the availability of computer corpora permits, as our subtitle suggests, “a more quicker, easier and more effective” way of gathering data for both synchronic and diachronic research Taken from the British National Corpus, which provides the main source of our data, our subtitle also illustrates well the competing forms of adjective comparison in contemporary spoken English that we will discuss here The primary competition is between the so-called inflectional comparative (e.g easier) which is the older form, and the newer periphrastic construction (e.g more effective), with the double comparative (e.g more quicker), now considered non-standard, much less frequent The use of a large computerized data base such as the British National Corpus allows us to demonstrate that some adjectives overwhelmingly show a preference for the newer periphrastic mode of comparison, some for the older inflectional form, while some fluctuate between the two We will also compare our results with a diachronic study done by Kytö (1996a) This yields a broad overview of the main lines of historical development which have shaped the modern system, at the same time as it allows us to pinpoint certain key stages in the transition from the earlier to the present-day system The Late ME and EModE data used in the diachronic study are of necessity written, while ours from modern English are by choice spoken Our original interest in the use of the non-standard double comparatives motivated our initial decision to begin our study of contemporary English with part of the spoken rather than written data in the British National Corpus because these double forms are now almost, if not entirely, confined to colloquial spoken English (see further in 3) This does, however, pose a problem for diachronic comparison, which we try to remedy somewhat by considering the material in the ARCHER corpus (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers; see Biber et al 1994a and 1994b) For the purposes of this study we have taken from ARCHER some 1.4 million words representing six text types2 sampled from the period between 1650–1990 Thus, the first subperiod from ARCHER overlaps with the final subperiod of the Early Modern English section of the Helsinki Corpus, and the last subperiod from ARCHER brings us up to the modern period covered by the British National Corpus This allows us to bridge the time gap between the Early Modern and contemporary English data Finally, we outline some issues requiring further research and suggest some ways of investigating them 2.2 Brief history of adjective comparison in English The topic of adjective comparison has been discussed in general terms in most of the grammars of contemporary English (see e.g Quirk et al 1985), in the standard handbooks on the history of English (see e.g Jespersen 1949), as well as in a few specialist works (see e.g Pound 1901, Knüpfer 1922 and Rohr 1929) Historically speaking, the so-called periphrastic constructions with more and most (e.g more vigorous, most vigorous) are innovations In Old English the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives were uniformly marked by inflectional endings; compare modern English greater and greatest The periphrastic forms first appeared in the thirteenth century (see Mitchell 1985: 84–5 for the few attested possible examples in Old English), possibly under the influence of Latin (and to a lesser extent French) They gained ground steadily after the 14th century until the beginning of the 16th century when they had become as frequent as they are today (see Pound 1901: 19) As is often the case with syntactic innovations in the history of English, a variety of factors has been cited as responsible We have already noted above historians’ attribution of the development to foreign influence At the same time others pointed to stylistic factors such as speakers’ needs for emphasis and clarity More generally speaking, however, the loss of inflectional morphology accompanying the gradual shift in English toward a more analytical syntax provided a typology consistent with the periphrastic construction Nevertheless, what we will show is that after the newer forms are introduced, change proceeds along a divergent track After an initial spurt in the use of the new periphrastic type of comparison in some environments, the newer forms eventually oust the older ones completely In other environments, however, the newer forms recede in favor of the older inflectional type The majority of both comparative and superlative adjectives in present-day English are in fact of the inflectional type, contrary to what one might expect from the general trend in English towards a more analytical syntax The availability of the new periphrastic constructions also added yet one more option to the system, a hybrid form in which more and most are combined with the inflectional adjective, e.g more quicker and most hardest These are usually called multiple or double comparatives.3 Inflectional double forms are also found in a limited number of words such as lesser, worser, bestest, more better As a consequence, during the Middle English and Early Modern English periods, there were three alternative forms of comparison for an adjective such as easy: inflectional (easier/easiest), periphrastic (more easy/most easy) and double (more easier/most easiest) 2.3 Recent research on adjective comparison in contemporary English A corpus study by Kytö and Romaine shows that the percentage of inflectional comparatives increased from 52% in 1750–1800 to 69% in 1900–1950, whereas that of inflectional superlatives remained at 53% in both periods (1997: 337) In a later study they found that the Diagram s for 1950–1990 were 62% and 63%, respectively (2000: 177) Many linguists suggest that today the synthetic comparison is becoming less common, but these Diagram s contradict this.3 Barber (1997: 146) sees the changes in adjective comparison as a part of the evolution of English from a synthetic to an analytic language Mondorf (2003: 253) cites a parallel development in the case of the two ways of building the genitive in English, where the ofgenitive is used in what she refers to as ‘more demanding environments.’ She investigates more-support along the same lines: In cognitively more demanding environments which require an increased processing load, language users tend to make up for the additional effort by resorting to the analytic (more) rather than the synthetic (–er) comparative (2003: 252) She gives several reasons for more-support related to phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics and syntax 10 19th century letter corpus of 100,000 words (see Denison 1994) Today the double forms are found primarily in the most colloquial registers of spoken English As far as linguistic conditioning factors for the two main variants are concerned, earlier scholars such as Pound (1901: 18) believed that the periphrastic and inflectional forms were in free variation and individual choice was the most important She writes: “Throughout the [fifteenth] century when both methods are used, the form of comparison is governed by no fixed principle, such as length, ending, accent, or the source of the word Instead the two methods are used quite indiscriminately, according to the author’s choice” Similarly, with respect to the modern English period, Jespersen (1949: 347) said that although the choice was “subject to certain restrictions”, these were not fixed; thus, a “good deal is left to the taste of the individual speaker or writer” In his view the “rules given in ordinary grammars are often too dogmatic” The diachronic investigation of the Helsinki Corpus revealed both text type and word structure as important factors Generally speaking, inflectional forms prevail in matter-of-fact text types such as handbooks, and language written to reflect spoken or colloquial registers Periphrastic forms are characteristic of more rhetorical texts such as philosophical and religious treatises, and correspondence We will argue in that this may be evidence for the origin of the periphrastic forms in written registers Modern grammarians generally recognize the length of the adjective and the nature of the word ending as the primary linguistic factors determining the choice between inflectional and periphrastic comparison There is also an obvious connection between linguistic factors such as the length of the word, word origin (i.e foreign v native) and extralinguistic factors such as text type and register Despite Pound’s assertion of free variation, word length emerged as a powerful factor in accounting for a good deal of the variation in the Helsinki Corpus material In monosyllabic words the inflectional forms prevailed in some 70 percent of the instances with both comparative and superlative uses from the 1350s on and gained ground gradually, ending up with a 90 percent coverage of the data by the early 1700s The material in the ARCHER corpus confirms this general trend, where the range of variation in the periods 1650 to 1900 is 90 to 95% By contrast, 22 in the Helsinki Corpus data words with four or more syllables always formed the comparative periphrastically; no more than four out of 51 instances formed the superlative inflectionally Trisyllabic words allowed some variation, with out of 100 examples forming comparatives inflectionally and 13 out of 152 examples forming the superlative inflectionally In the ARCHER corpus words of three or more syllables always form comparatives periphrastically The same is true of superlatives from 1700 onwards Disyllabic words, however, present more fertile ground for variation both then and now In our sample from the British National Corpus word length and the nature of the word ending are also prime determinants of the variation between inflectional and periphrastic adjective forms Table shows that monosyllabic adjectives, which comprise the most frequent category accounting for 73% of the examples, form comparatives inflectionally in 99% of the total instances (N = 1,264) Among the exceptions are a handful of cases where the comparative is formed periphrastically, e.g more nice, more rough, more cool, more rude, more cheap, more flat, more fresh, more right, more broad, more real, more dry, more wide, more hot It is possible there are some phonological as well as orthographic conditioning factors operative here, which we have not investigated Jespersen (1949: 349), for instance, suggests that monosyllables ending in -d (e.g mad), -t (e.g fit) and -r (e.g dear) take inflectional endings, even though he notes some exceptions such as dead, chaste, etc Although orthographic considerations are not really relevant for our synchronic spoken material, they may be important for the earlier written corpora Jespersen (1949: 346) indicates that some writers may prefer periphrasis with monosyllabic adjectives ending in -y (e.g dry) to avoid orthographic complications Inflectional comparative forms for these adjectives require decisions about whether to preserve the -y (e.g dryer v drier) 23 Table 1.5: Adjective length in syllables (British National Corpus) Infl = inflectional forms, Peri = periphrastic forms COMPARATIVE(N=1, 726) ONE TWO Tota Per Infl Peri Infl l i 208 1248 11 16 1264 (65 320 (99%) %) SUPERLATIVE ONE TWO Per Tot Infl Peri total Infl i al 82 7350(999 358 (64 46 128 %) %) THREE Inf l Peri 114 (100% ) FOUR Tot al 114 Inf l Per 25 (100 %) THREE Tot al 25 FOUR Inf l Peri Tot al Inf l Peri Tot al 88(99 %) 89 15 (100 %) 15 24 Inf l Inf l Peri (100 %) Tota l FIVE Peri Tota l 2 ( 100 %) The Diagram s include present and past participles found in adjectival uses With disyllabic adjectives the use of the inflectional comparative drops to 65% Adjectives containing three or more syllables invariably form their comparatives periphrastically Likewise, for the superlatives, 98% of monosyllabic adjectives are of the inflectional type, while 64% of disyllabic adjectives are inflectional Adjectives with three or more syllables are nearly always of the periphrastic type There is, however, one exception in the trisyllabic category, i.e frustratedest Again, the disyllabic adjectives are of the most interest for examining variation between inflectional and periphrastic comparison Table shows the distribution of competing forms in the British National Corpus according to the nature of the word ending We have considered here only the clear and better represented categories The data are, however, skewed in favor of adjectives ending in -y/-ly (e.g happy, friendly, etc.), which account for 89% of the comparative forms and 86% of the superlatives Table 1.6: Word endings in disyllabic words (British National Corpus) Infl = inflectional forms, Peri = periphrastic forms COMPARATIVE(N=216) -L/-LY Infl Peri 194 (84%) 38 Total 232 SUPERLATIVE (N=101) -L/-LY Infl Peri total 76 (87%) 11 87 -LE/-ER Peri Infl 12 (80% 15 ) -FUL Infl Peri (100% ) -LE/-ER Peri Infl Infl Total (75% ) -OUS Infl Total -FUL Per Total (100% ) -OUS Peri Total Infl Peri Total (99%) (100% ) Moreover, the adjective easy covers a good deal of the data, slightly more than half (57% or 110 of the 194 cases) of the inflectional comparatives, and nearly a third (32% or 25 24 out of 76 cases) of the inflectional superlatives In the category of inflectional comparatives another few adjective types provide most of the tokens, i.e happy (N = 18), heavy (N = 13), early (N = 6), funny (N = 6), busy (N = 5), pretty (N = 4),10 and similarly for the inflectional superlatives, where funny (N = 7), heavy (N = 7), early (N = 6), ugly (N = 4) are the most frequent types.11 Likewise, for the periphrastic comparatives and superlatives, one adjective, likely, accounts for most of the tokens (N = 16, and N = 8, respectively) The next most frequent group of disyllabic adjectives with a majority of inflectional comparatives and superlatives contains those ending in -le/-er, e.g simple, proper, etc The other adjectives ending in -ous(e.g famous) or -ful (e.g careful) always form comparatives and superlatives periphrastically For adjectives ending in -ous, and other adjectives ending in sibilants, one might be tempted to suppose that the prime determinant of the preference for the periphrastic type of comparative with the superlative forms is phonological; namely, speakers will avoid the repetition of two sibilants, e.g *foolishest, *famousest Jespersen (1949: 355), however, found more superlatives than comparatives of the inflectional type Generally speaking, there are no big surprises here Quirk et al (1985: 462), for example, indicate that the disyllabic adjectives most readily able to take inflected forms are those ending in an unstressed vowel (e.g easy, narrow), syllabic /l/ (e.g simple), or schwa (with or without /r/) (e.g clever) Although Quirk et al (1985: 462) categorically rule out inflectional forms for trisyllabic adjectives, we did find one exception among the superlatives, i.e frustratedest Note, too, example (14) above, of a double superlative form with the inflectional ending, i.e beautifulest Otherwise, comparison is of the periphrastic type 26 CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION Table 4.1, which charts the incidence of the periphrastic forms for the three time periods, Late Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English, allows us to pinpoint some key periods in the implementation and transition of the change We have also included here data from 18th and 19th centuries from ARCHER to cover the time gap between the Helsinki Corpus and the British National Corpus The graph in Diagram shows how the newer periphrastic type of adjective comparison has continued to gain ground for some groups of adjectives (i.e those ending in -ful and -ous), while in others it lost some ground (i.e those ending in -y/-ly and -le/-er) after initially gaining a foothold in the system earlier Thus, we see a pattern of change familiar to variationists, where change proceeds stepwise by environments It accelerates in some environments while in others it is inhibited Table 4.1 : Percent of periphrastic forms of disyllabic adjective comparison in Late Middle, Early Modern and Contemporary English COMPARATIVE -Y/-LY -LE/ER 64 43 54 50 20 -FUL LME 76 78 EmodE 64 100 th 18 c 60 100 th 19 c 28 100 PresE 16 100 SUPERLATIVE LME 64 63 92 EmodE 48 75 95 18th c 33 60 93 th 19 c 27 33 100 PresE 13 25 100 Looking at the data for Late Middle English comparative -OUS 83 100 100 100 100 92 100 100 100 100 forms, for example, we find that the new periphrastic type has not yet completely established itself in adjectives ending in -ous and -ful, where a small number of cases are still inflectional (greuosere) out of and (joyfuller, two instances from the same text) out of 9, respectively.12 By the Early Modern English period, however, comparison is categorically periphrastic, as it 27 is today Thus, the Helsinki Corpus data capture one key transition from a formerly variable to a new invariant stage for this group of adjectives Diagram 4.1 shows a classic S-curve pattern of change for these adjectives with the final part of the log phase between the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods The periphrastic superlatives also greatly outnumber the inflectional superlatives from the Late Middle English period onwards The data for superlative forms of adjective comparison show a similar trend for the group ending in -ous with 100% of these adjectives forming the superlative periphrastically by the Early Modern English period The data from the ARCHER corpus allows us to show that superlatives for adjectives ending in -ful not invariably take periphrastic forms until the 19th century Diagram 4.1: Percent of comparative periphrastic forms of disyllabic adjectives in Late Middle, Early Modern and Modern English Diagram 4.2: Percent of superlative periphrastic forms of disyllabic adjectives in Late Middle, Early Modern and Modern English While the periphrastic forms are consolidating themselves and replacing the inflectional forms in these groups of adjectives, they show a continuing decline for both superlative and comparative adjectives ending in -y/-ly and -le/-er Thus, the use of the newer form appears to have peaked early during the Late Middle English period and the older inflectional type has been reasserting itself since the Early Modern period The ARCHER corpus allows us to pinpoint the key transitions more precisely in time For instance, for the comparative adjectives ending in -y/-ly a steep drop in the use of the periphrastic forms occurs between the 18th and 19th centuries, while for the adjectives ending in -le/-er, it occurs a century later Unfortunately, we cannot shed any direct light on developments in the spoken language during the earlier periods when the change began and the newer forms began to make inroads into the system There are, however, at least three ways in which we can try to sharpen our understanding of the trajectory of change One is by means of 28 psycholinguistic experimentation to obtain acceptability judgements from speakers of present-day English and evidence for productivity of the two types of comparison (see Romaine 1983 for relevant methodology) This would be especially helpful for obtaining information about possible phonological and other conditioning factors for some of the infrequent adjective types A second one is by further investigation of register variation of the type begun with the Helsinki Corpus material Here we will need to apply techniques of socio-historical reconstruction in order to obtain a fuller spectrum of text types and styles, particularly those most likely to reveal similarities to spoken language We also need to examine, where possible, non-standard and regional varieties of English, which may have diverged from standard English with respect to this development (see Romaine 1982) Jespersen (1949: 356), for instance, observes the tendency towards more frequent use of inflection in what he calls ‘vulgar’ speech Other scholars such as Knüpfer (1922) and Curme (1931) also mention similar variation We hope to further work on the topic in the future A third possibility is to extend the data base to include comparative data from other Germanic languages, in particular Swedish, where Nordberg (1985) has documented a recent increase in the use of periphrastic forms such as mera varm (‘more warm’) and den mest vackra (‘most pretty’) in modern Swedish at the expense of the older inflectional type, e.g varmare (‘warmer’), den vackraste (‘prettiest’) The same tendency has also been noted for modern Danish, although as far as we know, no quantitative studies exist Nordberg’s data is especially interesting since it gives us a chance to witness the change in both spoken and written material over a thirty year period (1950–1980) By 1980 roughly 20% of forms were periphrastic and 80% inflectional Notice that this compares quite closely with the situation in contemporary English, where inflectional forms prevail in 81% of cases overall (i.e in comparatives and superlatives) and the inflectional forms in 19% of cases (see Table 3).13 While he found an increase in the newer periphrastic forms in both speech (from 15% to 24%) and writing (16% to 22%), Nordberg identifies spoken language as the spearhead of the change Although the 29 tendency towards periphrasis was first strongest in writing, it expanded more quickly in spoken language This may well have happened in English too; although this will probably be impossible to show with empirical research due to lack of relevant material from the inception stage Certainly Kytö’s finding that the periphrastic forms prevailed in the more rhetorical text types less likely to reflect spoken language is consistent with the possibility that the change in English might have begun in the written language and spread to the spoken It is also possible that further work with older Swedish spoken material from before the 1950s will reveal more about the relationship between spoken and written registers and allow us to pinpoint more precisely the locus of the change Nordberg also took into account some of the same linguistic conditioning factors we did, such as morphological complexity of word structure, as well as additional ones, such as foreign v native origin, part of speech, etc., which need further examination in English as we noted earlier Not surprisingly, he found more periphrastic forms in more complex words, as well as in words of foreign origin; native and monosyllabic words favor the inflectional type and are most resistant to periphrasis, as they are in English.14 Overall, Nordberg discovered more comparatives of the periphrastic type than superlatives, though the difference is quite small (21% compared to 18%, respectively) in the Swedish data, unlike in our English data where superlatives more strongly favor periphrastic forms at all three time periods Nevertheless, as we pointed out earlier, the relative difference between the frequencies of periphrastic comparatives and superlatives remains roughly the same over the three time periods with periphrastic superlatives around 9% to 10% more frequent than periphrastic comparatives The actual frequencies, of course, show more variation because the periphrastic forms are in decline In the late Middle English period 45% of comparative forms and 55% of superlatives are periphrastic, in the Early Modern English period 41% of comparatives and 50% of superlatives are periphrastic, while in modern English only 27% of superlatives and 16% of comparatives are periphrastic In any case, closer examination of Nordberg’s data reveals some differences between spoken and written Swedish More periphrastic 30 comparatives occur in writing than in speech whereas in speech the reverse is true There are more periphrastic superlatives than comparatives Nordberg also mentions, but dismisses, the possibility that English influence is responsible for the Swedish development on the grounds that there is no sign of a parallel change in German He suggests instead the possibility of a splitting of the grammatical category of comparison along semantic lines, with the periphrastic and inflectional forms expressing different meanings, one being used to express comparison and the other to express degree or intensity without comparison While this cannot be the only explanation, it merits further investigation in both English and Swedish As far as English is concerned, the possibility of meaning differences in the two types of comparison has not gone entirely unnoticed, though it has not been systematically investigated Curme (1931: 504), for instance, credits the periphrastic form with a stylistic advantage The use of a separate word (more/most) instead of an inflectional ending allows additional stress to be placed on the comparative element, if the speaker/writer wants to emphasize the idea of degree, or on the adjective to emphasize the meaning Jespersen (1949: 356) too observes that the inflectional forms, particularly in the superlative and in longer words, are generally felt as “more vigorous” and “more emphatic” than the periphrastic forms, e.g “the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud” (Mark Twain) If we can demonstrate that there are systematic meaning differences in the two forms, we may well have found the explanation for the differences between spoken and written language and be able to confirm that the change began first in the written language Spoken language always has the support of prosody to indicate which parts of the utterance the speaker wishes to emphasize In the written language, however, such cues must be marked in other ways, e.g through word order, punctuation, word choice, etc It is possible that periphrasis emerged as a stylistic option first in the written language to emphasize and focus on the comparison itself rather than the quality referred to in the adjective Curme (1931: 500–1) also draws attention to the fact that adjective placement in relation to the noun may be a relevant factor; monosyllabic adjectives following nouns 31 may take periphrastic form for emphasis Compare: ‘There never was a kinder and juster man’ with ‘There never was a man more kind and just’ We have not looked here at the effects of the syntactic category to which the adjective belongs, i.e attributive, predicate adjective, or present/past participle, nor at possible differences in their distribution in spoken and written registers Nordberg in fact found significant differences in the distribution of attributive and predicate adjectives in speech and writing Although attributive adjectives were more common than predicate adjectives in writing, more periphrastic constructions with attributive adjectives occurred in speech than in writing 32 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION I have presented an overview of variation in adjective comparison in contemporary spoken English using a sample of data from the British National Corpus By comparing our synchronic data with the data from the Helsinki Corpus and the ARCHER corpus, I have been able to identify some of the key stages in the introduction, expansion and decline of the periphrastic forms Inevitably some gaps remain, some of which I can fill in by further research with other corpora, both diachronic, such as ARCHER, as well as synchronic data bases Recent projects concerned with compilation of bilingual corpora may provide some exciting possibilities for this kind of research A case in point is the project ‘Text-based Contrastive Studies in English’ by Karin Aijmer, Bengt Altenberg and Mats Johansson, aiming at a corpus of Swedish and English machine-readable texts (see Aijmer et al 1996) I have concentrated for the moment on what is “more quicker, easier and more effective” to with computer corpora, but a more comprehensive treatment of the topic of adjective comparison will have to pay close attention to the issue of meaning This will require close scrutiny of individual texts and a more careful qualitative semantic analysis A variety of terms has been used to refer to the two types of comparison Although the term ‘inflectional’ is not entirely accurate, since, strictly speaking, no inflection is involved (Pound 1901: 2), it is the one most commonly used Because other terms such as ‘terminational’ (see e.g Curme 1931) or ‘non-periphrastic’ have not been much used in recent literature, we will stick to the terms ‘inflectional’ and ‘periphrastic’ in this study (see Quirket al 1985) I have also limited my study to gradable adjectives, excluding inflectional and periphrastic forms of adverb comparison The text types include: science, journals/diaries, letters, fiction, drama and sermons The planned size of the ARCHER corpus is 1.7 million words My searches were carried out on the basis of the words more and most, and the word class codes included in the British National Corpus (AJ0 = general or positive form, AJC = comparative adjective, AJS = superlative adjective) The British National Corpus was tagged automatically by using the CLAWS word class annotation scheme and, 33 understandably enough, coding errors can be found in the 100-million-word corpus In certain contexts the tagger has left relevant forms uncoded When coming across with such instances, I have included them in the data However, I have not made a systematic search of the examples possibly missing from the data I have not counted negative adjective comparisons with less/least since there is no corresponding inflectional form There was a total of only 24 clear instances of less + adjective, e.g less crowded I did, however, find one example of a double form: ‘And make a bit less smaller to screw’ I use a dash to indicate a new speaker within an utterance and three points to indicate text omitted For clarity, the codes found in the data base to indicate utterance attributes, word class tags, punctuation, etc have been removed, but the following SGML codes have been kept (cf Users Reference Guide 1995: 79): = truncated form in a spoken text; = non-verbal vocalization in a spoken text; = incomprehensible or inaudible passage in a spoken text Moreover, in this group I have adjectives with three occurrences (sporty, healthy, skinny), with two (kinky, merry, handy), and 17 with only one (tasty, nasty, angry, dirty, noisy, likely, tidy, cocky, bulky, mucky, dressy, muddy, cosy, holy, fancy, shiny, wheezy) In addition, this group includes adjectives with three occurrences (nasty, busy), with two (happy, dirty, pervy, pretty), and 14 with only one (crazy, chewy, healthy, pushy, noisy, foggy, lucky, cocky, greeny, grassy, tiny, tasty, horny, raunchy) 34 REFERENCES Biber, Douglas, Edward Finegan, Dwight Atkinson, Ann Beck, Dennis Burges & Jena Burges (1994b) “The Design and Analysis of the ARCHER Corpus: A Progress Report [A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers]”.Corpora Across the Centuries Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on English Diachronic Corpora, St Catharine’s College Cambridge, 25–27 March 1993, ed by Merja Kytö, Matti Rissanen & Susan Wright, 3–6 Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi BNC = The British National Corpus (May 1995) Oxford: Oxford University Computing Services Curme, George O (1931) A Grammar of the English Language Volume II: Syntax D C Heath & Company [Reprint 1977 Essex, CT: Verbatim Printing.] Denison, David (1994) “A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose” Corpora Across the Centuries Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on English Diachronic Corpora, St Catharine’s College Cambridge, 25–27 March 1993, ed by Merja Kytö, Matti Rissanen & Susan Wright, 7–16 Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi Helsinki Corpus = The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (1991) Helsinki: Department of English, University of Helsinki Jespersen, Otto (1949) A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles Part VII: Syntax Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard & London: George Allen & Unwin Knüpfer, Hans (1922) Die Anfange der periphrastischen Komparation im Englischen Diss Heidelberg Also in: Englische Studien 55 (1921), 321–389 10 Kytö, Merja & Suzanne Romaine 1997 Competing forms of adjective comparison in Modern English: What could be more quicker and easier and more effective? In Terttu Nevalainen & Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), 329–352 35 11 Kytö, Merja & Suzanne Romaine 2000 Adjective comparison and standardisation process in American and British English from 1620 to the present In Laura Wright (ed.), The development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, descriptions, conflicts (Studies in English Language), 171–194 Cambridge, New York, Melbourne & Madrid: Cambridge University Press 12 Leech, Geoffrey & Jonathan Culpeper 1997 The comparison of adjectives in recent British English In Terttu Nevalainen & Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.), 353–373 36 ... is why I chooses studying English grammar for the graduation paper, particularly adjectives in English I decided to a study focusing on Adjective comparison in contemporary English I hopes that... Modern and contemporary English data Finally, we outline some issues requiring further research and suggest some ways of investigating them 2.2 Brief history of adjective comparison in English The... are consolidating themselves and replacing the inflectional forms in these groups of adjectives, they show a continuing decline for both superlative and comparative adjectives ending in -y/-ly and