Chipping away at -er comparatives?

[Benjamin Barrett]

-y words generally pair with -er, but in AmE, I think other disyllabic words tend to go with more. BB

On Mar 10, 2014, at 11:11 AM, W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> 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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