Brief history of adjective comparison in English【转贴】

Brief history of adjective comparison in English【转贴】

The topic of adjective comparison has been discussed in general terms in most of the grammars of contemporary English (see e.g. Quirk et al. 1985), in the standard handbooks on the history of English (see e.g. Jespersen 1949), as well as in a few specialist works (see e.g. Pound 1901, Knüpfer 1922 and Rohr 1929). Historically speaking, the so-called periphrastic constructions with more and most (e.g. more vigorous, most vigorous) are innovations. In Old English the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives were uniformly marked by inflectional endings; compare modern English greater and greatest. The periphrastic forms first appeared in the thirteenth century (see Mitchell 1985: 84–5 for the few attested possible examples in Old English), possibly under the influence of Latin (and to a lesser extent French). They gained ground steadily after the 14th century until the beginning of the 16th century when they had become as frequent as they are today (see Pound 1901: 19).

As is often the case with syntactic innovations in the history of English, a variety of factors has been cited as responsible. We have already noted above historians’ attribution of the development to foreign influence. At the same time others pointed to stylistic factors such as speakers’ needs for emphasis and clarity. More generally speaking, however, the loss of inflectional morphology accompanying the gradual shift in English toward a more analytical syntax provided a typology consistent with the periphrastic construction. Nevertheless, what we will show is that after the newer forms are introduced, change proceeds along a divergent track. After an initial spurt in the use of the new periphrastic type of comparison in some environments, the newer forms eventually oust the older ones completely. In other environments, however, the newer forms recede in favor of the older inflectional type. The majority of both comparative and superlative adjectives in present-day English are in fact of the inflectional type, contrary to what one might expect from the general trend in English towards a more analytical syntax.

The availability of the new periphrastic constructions also added yet one more option to the system, a hybrid form in which more and most are combined with the inflectional adjective, e.g. more quicker and most hardest. These are usually called multiple or double comparatives.3 Inflectional double forms are also found in a limited number of words such as lesser, worser, bestest, more better. As a consequence, during the Middle English and Early Modern English periods, there were three alternative forms of comparison for an adjective such as easy: inflectional (easier/easiest), periphrastic (more easy/most easy) and double (more easier/most easiest).