Chipping away at -er comparatives?

W Brewer brewerwa at GMAIL.COM
Mon Mar 10 18:11:32 UTC 2014


AW:  <<And isn't the tendency for shorter (1-syllable) adjs to take the
suffixes, but the longer ones to take ... more/most?>>
WB:  Taiwanese EFL interlanguage typically combine the synthetic &
analytic:  <more crazier>. Hawai'ian pidgin, too:  <Hey, bra'! Do it da
kine mo' betta!>
AW: <<Two-syllable adjs like "crazy" are at the borderline . . .>>
WB: What about <humble>: <<No {humbler / *more humble} pope could be found
than Francis.>> where <humble> is disyllabic in the analytic construction,
but monosyllabic in the synthetic. <<He is certainly {*humbler / more
humble}than your average pope.>> Maybe something about attributive vs.
predicate adjective position.
Mustn't think too much about these things. Bad for the intuition.

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