The Adjective. The degrees of comparison

1) Meaning: is a POS expresses property or quality of substances. Permanent (a red flower), Temporary (a red face). Adjectives traditionally divided into qualitative, which denote qualities of a person or thing in dif. degrees (warm – warmer, the warmest); and relative, which characterized a person or things through it’s relations to other things (time – ancient culture; place – western union; material – a golden ring; nationality – an American boy). – SEMANTIC classification.

Form: Adj has neither number, nor case, not gender distinction. Eng A. are invariable unlike Russian.

Function: 1.On the phrase level: A+N (*French – times immemorial); with proceeding an adverb (very small), occasionally with the proceeding verb (married young). 2.On sentence level: attb, predict, object predict.

Derivation: (less, like, full).

2) Adj expressed qualities may be compared. The adj have 2 morphemes of degrees of quality, they are called sometimes “suffixes of comparison”. - Zero morpheme for the positive degree;

- overed – er – comparative; -est – superlative.

*Supplitive forms: good – better – the best, bad – worse – the worst.

How many degrees of comparison there are:

2d: Smirnitskii, Ganshina, Ilyish – 1^st form doesn’t express any comparison.

3d: Jigadlo, Haimovich, Barhutdarov, Artemieva (positive, comparative, superlative).

Not every A has degrees of comparison (qualitative). Occasionally some relative (sem. Dif.) - comporables/noncomporables (Haimovich, Rogovskaia). Some A may not be used in the degrees of comparison due to their lex meaning (blind, deaf, dead, empty) *for artistic purposes. Not all eng. Nouns have syntactical forms of degrees (analytical way): more than two syllables, 1 syllable, when ends in two voiceless/noisy consonants (crisp, modest, laxe), A derived from present participle (interesting, charming).

3) Problems: 1. If combination more +A analytical or free syntactical combination. The trad. View tha this phrase wear analytical degrees of comparison: - used with the A, that can be copared; - the meaning of the combination is the same as syntactical formation (with suffixies).

But there are some arguments in favor of the 2d conception (Jigadlo): - the words more and most don’t lose their lexical meaning (more time, most people); - the combination are similar to the combination less/list+A, which are free syntactical combination; occasionally the combination has a special meaning – not a highest quality, but just a very high without any comparison, we use the indefinite article before the phrase (“Illative meaning”) – (M.J.Blokh is a most remarkable linguist).

There is one more problem – the problem of comparison less/list+A – degree or free form -> unsolved.

4) Substantivisation of A: 1. Complete – all categories of nouns (native – the natives of the village were all young/The native’s village). 2. Partially substantivized - the poor, the rich.