Inhaltszusammenfassung

In the various English grammar books, rules are formulated that govern the choice between synthetic comparatives, e.g. proud ? prouder ? proudest, and analytic comparatives, e.g. important ? more important ? most important. These rules reflect the generally held wisdom that the factors conditioning the choice between the synthetic and analytic variants are predominantly morphological, such as the number of syllables and the nature of the word ending (e.g. syllabic ?l, final ?y). This paper ex...In the various English grammar books, rules are formulated that govern the choice between synthetic comparatives, e.g. proud ? prouder ? proudest, and analytic comparatives, e.g. important ? more important ? most important. These rules reflect the generally held wisdom that the factors conditioning the choice between the synthetic and analytic variants are predominantly morphological, such as the number of syllables and the nature of the word ending (e.g. syllabic ?l, final ?y). This paper examines the effect of a new factor determining the choice between these two comparative forms, namely that of the syntactic environment, and in particular the presence or absence of a prepositional adjective com¬plement. While there is general consent in the literature that trisyllabic words take the historically more recent analytic comparatives and superlatives and that monosyllables take synthetic variants, with disyllabic words being subject to variation, a first analysis of com¬puterized corpora indicates that given the right syntactic environment, even monosyllables can strikingly often violate this rule. It will be argued that it is the complexity of the syn-tactic envi¬ronment, and in particular the presence of a prepositional adjective complement that calls for the analytic variant.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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Sprachwissenschaften

DDC Sachgruppe:
Englisch