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- Title
Adjectives of Comparison: The Grammaticalization of their Attribute Uses into Postdeterminer and Classifier Uses.
- Authors
Breban, Tine; Davidse, Kristin
- Abstract
In this article we are concerned with English adjectives expressing 'general comparison', viz. same, identical equal, comparable, similar, related, other, different, further, additional. More specifically, we will examine the polysemy between 'attributive' and 'referential' uses of those adjectives. The analytical distinctions and semantic characterizations we will propose come, besides from critical dialogue with the literature, in large measure from the patterns thrown up by an extended database, viz. approximately 2,400 examples extracted from the COBUILD corpus on the ten adjectives listed above. In section 1, we will, as a starting point of this examination, look at Halliday and Hasang (1976) binary distinction between attribute uses expressing 'internal comparison' and postdeterminer uses realizing 'referential comparison' We will make a first correction to this distinction by noting that some 'referential' uses are in fact classifier uses. In section 2, we will offer a further critique of Halliday and Hasan's binary distinction, both from a grammatical and a semantic perspective If one traces grammatical properties of attributes such as equivalence with predicative alternate and gradability in the data, then it appears that attribute uses of com parative adjectives can express either 'internal' or 'external' comparison. The text-grammatical properly of phoricity, on the other hand, is associated with postdeterminers as well as classifiers. In section 3, we then propose Breban's (2002) alternative generalization for the polysemy at stake: the attribute uses are fully lexical, while the postdeterminer and classifier uses result from the grammaticalization of the lexical notions of likeness and non-likeness. This delexicalization and grammaticalization process involves a shift from expressing degrees of likeness between entities to simply identifying instances or types as 'different' or 'identical" ones to other instances or types in the discourse. In section q, we present the quantified results of our corpus study, which we interpret in the light of the grammaticalization hypothesis. Not only does this give us an insight into the current semantic organization of the domain of comparison in English, but it also reveals the varying degrees to which the different adjectives of comparison have grammaticalized.
- Subjects
ENGLISH adjectives; ADJECTIVES (Grammar); ENGLISH language -- Nominals; POLYSEMY; SEMANTICS; LINGUISTICS; LANGUAGE &; languages
- Publication
Folia Linguistica, 2003, Vol 37, Issue 3/4, p269
- ISSN
0165-4004
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/flin.2003.37.3-4.269