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English Adjective Comparison

A historical perspective

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ISBN 9789027248152 | EUR 110.00 | USD 165.00
 
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The present work contributes to a better understanding of the English system of degree by means of a study of a number of aspects in the evolution of adjective comparison that have so far either been considered controversial or not been accounted for at all. As will be shown, the diachronic aspects analysed will also have synchronic implications. Furthermore, unlike previous synchronic as well as diachronic accounts of adjective comparison, this monograph does not concentrate only on the ‘standard’ comparative strategies (i.e. inflectional and periphrastic forms), but also deals with double periphrastic comparatives, thus providing an analysis of the whole range of comparative structures in English.
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 299] 2008.  xix, 252 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 19 September 2008
Table of Contents
“[...] an important contribution to the study of historical linguistics, adjective comparison and semantic-pragmatic aspects presently discussed in language contact issues and variation research. It provides new insights into the emergence and historical development of English comparatives and uncovers a range of hitherto unknown aspects concerning the origin of analytic comparative forms.”
Cited by (38)

Cited by 38 other publications

ALEXIADOU, ARTEMIS, DESPINA OIKONOMOU & STEPHANIE ROTTER
2026. Comparing comparatives: appropriateness ratings of synthetic, analytic and double comparatives in American and British English. English Language and Linguistics 30:1  pp. 32 ff. DOI logo
Adamczyk, Elżbieta
2025. Historical Morphology. In The New Cambridge History of the English Language,  pp. 468 ff. DOI logo
Tagadiad, Michael John
2025. Variations of comparative forms in online discourses: Acceptability and practicality. Linguistics Initiative 5:1  pp. 75 ff. DOI logo
Auer, Anita
2024. The History of English. In Language in Britain and Ireland,  pp. 11 ff. DOI logo
Bouso, Tamara
Suárez-Gómez, Cristina & Cristhian Tomàs-Vidal
2024. Adjective comparison in African varieties of English. Research in Corpus Linguistics 12:1  pp. 89 ff. DOI logo
Visser, Lourens
2024. Old and Middle English adverbs of degree in their wider West Germanic context. NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution 77:2  pp. 110 ff. DOI logo
Atlashova, Irina Andreevna & Alena Mikhailovna Klyushina
2023. The category of comparison as an object of linguistic research: A theoretical and analytical review. Philology. Theory & Practice 16:12  pp. 4124 ff. DOI logo
Janda, Richard D.
2020. Perturbations, Practices, Predictions, and Postludes in a Bioheuristic Historical Linguistics. In The Handbook of Historical Linguistics,  pp. 523 ff. DOI logo
Watanabe, Ayano & Yoko Iyeiri
2020. Explaining the variability of adjective comparatives and superlatives: entering the twenty-first century. <i>WORD</i> 66:2  pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
Crystal, David
2019. Language. In The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare,  pp. 161 ff. DOI logo
Fanego, Teresa
2019. Shakespeare’s Grammar. In The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare,  pp. 184 ff. DOI logo
CHUA, DEBORAH
2018. Understanding comparative alternation iny-adjectives: What else might we need?. Journal of Linguistics 54:3  pp. 459 ff. DOI logo
Gu, Qianping
2017. A corpus-based comparative study on the superlative forms in British English and Singapore Colloquial English. <i>WORD</i> 63:4  pp. 241 ff. DOI logo
Méndez-Naya, Belén
2017. Co-occurrence and iteration of intensifiers in Early English. English Text Construction 10:2  pp. 249 ff. DOI logo
CHEUNG, LAWRENCE & LONGTU ZHANG
2016. Determinants of the synthetic–analytic variation across English comparatives and superlatives. English Language and Linguistics 20:3  pp. 559 ff. DOI logo
Bonami, Olivier
2015. Periphrasis as collocation. Morphology 25:1  pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
Markopoulos, Theodore
2015. Contact-induced grammaticalization in older texts. In New Directions in Grammaticalization Research [Studies in Language Companion Series, 166],  pp. 209 ff. DOI logo
Percy, Carol
2012. Attitudes, prescriptivism, and standardization. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English,  pp. 446 ff. DOI logo
Elenbaas, Marion
2011. More Support forMore-Support: The Role of Processing Constraints on the Choice between Synthetic and Analytic Comparative Forms (Studies in Language Variation 4). English Studies 92:2  pp. 234 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 5. Discourse marker eh. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 69 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. Acknowledgements. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. ix ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. Appendix 2. Excerpt from a transcript. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 233 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 1. Introduction. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 8. Standardization, levelling and identity in Jersey: A bird’s eye perspective. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 181 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. List of maps, figures and tables. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. xi ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. Index. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 2. Theoretical foundations. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 7 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 7. Other grammatical features: An overview. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 147 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 9. Conclusion. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 205 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 3. Jersey English in context. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 25 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. References. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 4. Methods and data. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 43 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. 6. Features of the Jersey English verb phrase. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 103 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2014. Appendix 1. Written questionnaire. In Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English [Varieties of English Around the World, G48],  pp. 229 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2024. English. In Language in Britain and Ireland,  pp. 9 ff. DOI logo

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