Qualifiable favorite?

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:13 AM -0700 8/29/02, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>a. murie asks if FAVORITE is gradable, and lynne murphy says it is for
>her.  it is for me too.
>
>i think that the generalization is that if you can conceive of
>approximations to the state denoted by an adjective, then you can
>treat the adjective as gradable.  if you can use ALMOST, say, with the
>adjective, then you can construct a scale of degrees of approximation
>to the state, and then you can meaningfully use the comparative grade
>of the adjective.  (nouns too - "more of a man" - and prepositional
>phrases - "more in tune".)

and don't forget our old friend, "most unique", "very unique", etc.
Certainly "almost unique" is unobjectionable, but these superlatives
have been objected to (and are also widely used).

larry

>
>it follows that there are very few adjectives that can't be used
>gradably, at least in the sense that a well-intentioned person would
>understand what you meant by something like "more favorite".  on the
>other hand, many adjectives are conventionally gradable - graded
>occurrences of the adjective are frequent - while others aren't, at
>least at a particular time and for a particular speech community.
>it's the difference between getting gradability for free, as it were,
>and having to work for it.
>
>of course, things change, and (conventional) gradability tends to
>spread.  people who resist change are going to be unhappy about that.
>in the case of gradability (as in many other cases) the resisters tend
>to pick on a handful of new usages as being unacceptable (or
>"meaningless") and disregard many others.  not infrequently, they
>continue to pick on this disfavored handful for years, decades, or
>even centuries after gradability has been conventional for these
>adjectives for virtually all (other) speakers of the language.
>
>arnold, approving of "a more perfect union" (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)