英语论文网

Chapter One Introduction

When language users form the comparative (or superlative) degree of Englishadjectives, they are faced with the option of choosing between the synthetic (or:inflectional) comparative form, such as whiter, bigger, or readier and its analytic (or:periphrastic) variant, such as more white, more big and more ready. How is this choicedetermined? The most widely-discussed conditions in grammar books involve wordlength, measured in the number of syllables, and the nature of the final phonologicalsegment (i.e. vowel or consonant). There is a general consensus in the literature thatwords that have three or more syllables take the historically more recent analyticcomparative (more beautiful), while monosyllabic words take the historically oldersynthetic form (bigger), with disyllabic words being subject to variation (commoner,more common) (see e.g. Mondorf 2003). Concerning the variation among disyllabicwords, most grammars of contemporary English (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985) treat adjectivecomparison in general terms. Scholars have also tried to stipulate some prescriptiverules to guide the choice of the comparative forms. One widely accepted ruleconcerning the variation is that disyllabic words ending in “-y” prefer the syntheticform while others prefer the analytic form (cf. pretty – prettier).

1.1 Significance of the Study

When we choose the comparative form in a specific language context, do theprescriptive grammatical rules actually describe what language users actually do whenmaking comparatives? If they did, we would expect to see a quite uniform and clearpicture of English adjective comparison, i.e. forms such as “more apt” and “moreready” are ruled out by the grammar and should not occur in daily use. However, aGoogle search for the phrase “more apt” yields about 185,000,000 entries. On the firstpage of search results, the entry “apt (comparative apter or more apt)” given byWiktionary and the headline “Overweight Patients Hospitalized With PneumoniaMore Apt to Survive” published on Science Daily immediately catch attention; whenthe phrase “more ready” is searched on Google, about 3,380,000 hits are shown. Onthe first page of search results, the headline “Democrats, Republicans Seem MoreReady to Compromise on Deficit Deal” is prominent. The same situation applies toother words as well. Therefore, the conclusion is warranted that the true extent ofvariability in the area of English adjective comparison appears to have beenunderestimated in the past and needs more thorough investigation, as also argued inmany prior studies that have buttressed this statement (e.g. Kyt  & Romaine 2000;González-Díaz 2008; Mondorf 2009).Since English adjective comparison is anything but a hard and fast rule, thispaper will try to delve into this topic from a linguistic perspective, instead ofprescriptive grammar. During this research project, taking into account previousresearch such as that mentioned above, together with my own statistics gathered fromGoogle Books Ngram Viewer, this paper aims to present a comprehensive picture ofthe way English comparatives are formed, presenting a full morphological analysis. Inthis way, this paper hopes to contribute towards a comprehensive introduction of thisimportant and intriguing area of English morphology and hopes to draw moreattention of Chinese and other scholars to this topic in the near future.