Б. С. Хаймович, Б. И. Роговская теоретическая грамматика английского языка

THE ADJECTIVE

§ 101. Adjectives are a part of speech characterized by the following typical features:

1. The lexico-grammatical meaning of 'attributes (of substances)'. It should be understood that by 'attributes' we mean different properties of substances, such as their size (large, small), colour (red, blue), position in space (up-per, inner), material (wooden, woolen), psychic state of persons (happy, furious), etc.
2. The morphological category of the degrees of comparison¹.
3. The characteristic combinability with nouns (a beauti­ful girl), link-verbs (...is clever), adverbs, mostly those of degree (a very clever boy), the so-called 'prop word' one (the grey one).
4. The stem-building affixes -ful, -less, -ish, -ous, -ive, -ic, un-, pre-, in-, etc.
5. Its functions of an attribute and a predicative comple­ment.
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1} The absence of number distinguishes English adjectives from adjectives in all the other Germanic languages.

§ 102. The category of the degrees of comparison of adjec­tives is the system of opposemes (like long — longer — long­est) showing quantitative distinctions of qualities. More exactly, it shows whether the adjective denotes the property of some substance absolutely, or relatively as a higher or the highest amount of the property in comparison with that of some (or all) other substances.

Accordingly we speak of the 'positive' (long, good, beauti­ful), 'comparative' (longer, better, more beautiful) and 'super­lative' (longest, best, most beautiful) degrees.

§ 103. The 'positive' degree is not marked. We may speak of a zero morpheme. The 'comparative' and 'superlative' degrees are built up either synthetically (by affixation or. suppletivity) or analytically, which in the main depends on the phonetic structure of the stem, not on its meaning. If the stem is monosyllabic, or disyllabic with a stress on - the second syllable or ending in -er, -y, -le, -ow, the compara­tive and superlative degrees are usually built up synthetically by adding the suffixes -er and -est respectively. E. g. bright — brighter — brightest ².

In all other cases the comparative and superlative degrees are formed analytically with the help of the word-morphemes more and most.
E. g. cheerful — more cheerful — most cheerful ³.
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2} Among the exceptions are adjectives ending in two consonants, like just, lax, etc. Besides, R. Volbeda writes: "The words right and wrong especially in to be right/wrong, but also in other cases where they express (in)correctness usually take more and most when they are com­pared: He knew in his heart that she was more right than he."
³ In his book Linguistic Change in Present-Day English (Edinburg, 1964, p. 131) Ch. Barber writes: "The continued loss of inflexions and their replacement by syntactic devices is also seen in the comparative and superlative adjectives, where forms with -er and -est are being replaced by forms with more and most." As examples he produces the words cloudy, fussy, quiet, cruel, subtle, clever, profound, simple and pleasant.

§ 104. Suppletive opposemes are few in number but of very frequent occurrence.

E. g. good — better — best
bad — worse — worst
The quantitative pronominal adjectives or adjective pro­nouns (see § 179) many, much and little form opposites of comparison in a similar way.
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