The Syntax of the Compared Adjective in English

Abstract

The grammarian, having delimited the range of data he suspects to be related, seeks to express this relatedness (= regularity = generalization) in the simplest and clearest (= most revealing) way. For example, examining some English phrases, he may notice: (1) the man I do business with (2) the man that I do business with (3) the man who(m) I do business with (4) the man with whom I do business (5) the man to do business with (6) the man with whom to do business and would, perhaps, like to state the manner in which certain clauses and clauselike sequences are attached to a noun to form a complex nominal; he would be especially pleased if he could reflect the unity of the mechanism in a single statement. Most of the time, the data do not lend themselves to such elegant summary, and the grammarian must settle for a major statement backed up by one or two qualifying ‘remarks’ (as the older handbooks say). But he does not ‘settle’ easily.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.