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l stance adopted in her book is abroadly functional one and performance is the central focus of the investigation. ToVictorina González-Diaz, language-internal factors are not restricted to considerationsof structure but also include cognitive/semantic factors (e.g. desire for expressiveness,maintenance or development of iconicity, avoidance of ambiguity) and the latterfactors are the focus of the book.To sum up, previous scholars have attempted to deal with the issue of choosingEnglish adjective comparison from the above-mentioned perspectives. However, theissue of inflectional vs. periphrastic comparative is far from settled. This paper aimsto contribute its bit by a study of new data from Google Books Ngram Viewer, whichcontributes both historical data for the period 1500-to-present, frequency data, andpatterns of usage.

1.3 Structure of the thesis

The present thesis is structured as follows: Chapter 2 presents the diachronicresearch on English adjective comparison, resorting to secondary resourcesconcerning the adjectives in language development and also collects and analyzes datafrom the Google Ngram Viewer. Chapter 3 focuses on synchronic research, mainlyanalyzing the data concerning the English adjective comparison from the GoogleNgram Viewer in the last three decades. Adjectives will be grouped according to theirnumber of syllables: monosyllabic adjectives and disyllabic adjectives. The nature ofthe adjective - being gradable or not - will also be taken into consideration, which wasnot adequately addressed in previous research. Chapter 4 presents an analysis on thechoice between synthetic and analytic forms of English adjective comparison. In thischapter, the cognitive complexity hypothesis, applied in Mondorf’s analysis, will beexamined on the basis of data collected from the Google Ngram Viewer. Syntacticposition is also considered due to the sample sentences including the use ofinvestigated adjective extracted from Google Books Ngram Viewer. In addition, theholistic linguistic factors will be re-examined to complete the analysis. Finally,Chapter 5 summarizes and discusses the most important findings in the researchproject and points out issues for further research.

1.4 Research methodology

As seen above, previous scholars have presented precious insights and results.The research methodology mainly focuses on two factors: one is the source of the dataand the other is the way to analyze the data collected.As for the diachronic research, secondary resources will be referenced, togetherwith the first resource collected from the Google Ngram Viewer. The synchronicresearch introduced in this paper is predominantly based on Google Ngram Viewerdata. As for the frequency of the adjective, this can be extracted from the study ofcorpora.After the collection of data, data analysis will be performed in following ways:since Google Ngram Viewer can show the accurate development trail of a specificword or phrase with the advancement of time, I will mark the synthetic comparativeand analytic comparative in the same year to check which form is favored; anotherfactor that should be clarified is the way to handle the data - to calculate thepercentage of analytic forms (or synthetic forms) for the sake of convenience due tothe fact that the frequency of a certain comparative form gathered from the GoogleNgram Viewer may be extremely tiny.

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