Comparisons with adjectives

Adjectives

Adjectives express characteristics of an object. The property described may be material, dimension, quality, etc.

The adjective has a semantically bound character. In English it’s emphasized by its usage with the pronoun one or ones:

e.g. Our club has two swimming pools: a deep one and a shallow one.

Some of our lectures are interesting, but I go to sleep in the boring ones.

On the other hand, the noun is often not repeated, if the substitute one is not needed with the adjectives of color or with superlatives. In these cases the adjective is used with the article:

e.g. What shoes shall I wear: the black (ones) or the brown (ones)?

He writes good novels, but this is the best (one).

Which shoes shall I wear: new or old?

With the material uncountable nouns there will be no substitute one, of course:

e.g. I prefer strong coffee to weak.

Certain adjectives are used without a noun when they refer to entities outside the text. But these nouns are self-understood:

e.g. Have you heard the latest (news)? (colloq)

I did well in the oral, but not in the written (exam).

In English the meaning can be expressed not by ellipses of a noun, but very often with the help of the word thing.

The strange thing is that they never answered our letter.

Adjective are distinguished by specific combinability with the nouns which they modify usually in preposition, occasionally in postposition, by combinability with link words

When used as predicatives or postpositional attributes, a considerable number of ajectives are distinguished by their combinability with nouns in prepositional phrases like to be fond of, jealous of, curious of/about, suspicious of, angry with, certain about, happy about, thankful for. Such collocations have essentially verbal meanings, and some of them have parallels among verbs. E.g. to be fond of means “to love”, to be thankful means “to thank”, etc.

All the adjectives are usually divided into two big subclasses: qualitative and relative (относительные).

Qualitative ones express quality (hard) of an object. The measure of the quality may be estimated as high or low, sufficient or non-sufficient, etc.

Relative adjectives express such properties of a substance as are determined by the direct relation of the substance to other substance (wooden, grammatical, historical, tabular, medieval).

The nature of adjectives is best revealed by their correllations with nouns (Blokh).

In this connection the ability of the qualitative adjective to form degrees of comparison is usually taken as a formal sign of its qualitative character, opposed to a relative adjective, which is understood as incapable of forming degrees of comparison.

However, in actual speech this principle of distinction is not always strictly observed. In the first place substances can possess such qualities as are incapable or incompatable with the idea of degrees of comparison. Therefore we can’t form degrees of comparison with such qualitative adjectives like deaf, blind, final, immobile, fixed, etc.

In the second place many relative adjectives are capable of forming degrees of comparison, when the relative property of a substance is viewed by degrees or gradually.

e.g. a grammatical topic – a purely grammatical topic

a military design – a less/more military design

Professor Blokh introduces an additional linguistic distinction, based on evaluative function of adjectives. Adjectives give some qualitative evaluation to the substance or they only point out the corresponding native property. He calls them evaluative and specificative.

One and the same adjective, irrespective of it being relative or qualitative, can be either used in the evaluative function or in the specificative function.

wooden face, iron will, steel nerves

Metaphorical usage.

Some scholars (Ferris, “The meaning of syntax) differentiate between the ascriptive and associative adjectives. He writes about the difference in interpretation of the adjectives. His Italian diary, her legal advice, my English teacher.

Order of adjectives in attributive position:

brown hair

light-brown hair

straight light-brown hair

long straight light-brown hair

beautiful long straight light-brown hair

The order is: personal evaluation, size, age, shape, color, the participle, noun-derivational adjective (or noun), noun.

Comparisons with adjectives

Adjectives help us to say that things are alike (Notingham is as big as Lester. Liverpool is larger than Sheffield). We can make equal (as blind as a bat) and unequal comparisons (using the degrees of comparison).

The traditional view held by practical and theoretical grammars was that phrases of this type were of analytical comparison (more, the most). However, there’s another view that these phrases in principle do not differ from

Arguments: the actual meaning of formations like more/the most difficult does not differ from degrees of comparison like larger/the largest. Qualitative adjectives like difficult express properties which may be present in different degrees, therefore they are bound to have degrees of comparison.

Counter-arguments: the words more/most have the same meaning in the phrases as in other phrases which they may appear in (more time, most cases). Alongside of the phrases more/the most diffcult there are also phrasees lik less/the least difficult, and there seems to be no sufficient reason for treating the two sets of phrases in different ways, saying that more difficult is an analytical form, while less difficult is not. Besides more/less and the most/least can be equally combined with difficult showing that they are not free phrases and are not analytical phrases.

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