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The Syntax of the Compared Adjective in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Paul C. Doherty and
Arthur Schwartz
Paul C. Doherty
Affiliation:
Boston College
Arthur Schwartz
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

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. (1) the man I do business with

  2. (2) the man that I do business with

  3. (3) the man who(m) I do business with

  4. (4) the man with whom I do business

  5. (5) the man to do business with

  6. (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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 1967, pp. 903 - 936
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This work was supported principally by the U.S. Air Force (Electronics Systems Division) under Contract AF19(628)-2487, and in part by the Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DA36-039-AMC-03200 (E)), the National Science Foundation (Grant 6K-835), the National Institutes of Health (Grant 2PO MH-04737-06), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NsG-496); additional support was received through the National Institutes of Health (Grant 1-F2-MH-28,942-01PS).

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