| In English, there are two ways of making comparisons of adjectives: either adding the inflectional suffix -er or - est or inserting a periphrastic form more or most before the adjective. A simple way to choose one of the two forms is to look at the number of syllables in the word. As a general rule, English monosyllabic adjectives take the inflectional form and adjectives of three or more syllables the periphrastic form. Disyllabic adjectives, however, alternate between the two.;In describing the choice between the inflectional and the periphrastic way for disyllabic adjectives, grammar book writers have tried to provide extensive lists of adjective endings that might affect the forms of comparisons. Criteria used in determining which form to use, however, tend to be either oversimplified or unreliable. To improve this situation, corpus-based studies suggest that analyses of representative corpora can help identify real patterns of actual language use. That is, they confirm that empirical evidence obtained from computer corpora can provide more accurate and reliable descriptions of language use. In fact, previous corpus based studies have shown that computer corpora have made it possible for researchers to investigate the choice of English comparison more effectively. By expanding the scope of previous research, this dissertation investigates to what extent phonological and morphological factors play a role in predicting language users' choice, and whether syntactic and semantic factors are likely to create linguistic environments where one method is favored over the other.;This dissertation investigates mainly two large computer corpora, the Brown and the TASA corpus, in analyzing possible factors predicting real language users' choice between the two forms of comparison. The corpora show that there are various factors influencing the current distributive patterns of comparatives and superlatives. To extend corpus findings to more practical dimensions, some implications for ESL/EFL teaching are also discussed. |
