COMPARATIVES AND SUPERLATIVES

COMPARATIVES AND SUPERLATIVES

1. COMPARATIVES

   • 1 My house is bigger than yours. 2 Your grade is worse than mine. 3 The Pacific Ocean is deeper than the Arctic Ocean. 4 You are more polite than Joey. 5 My brother is taller than I am, but he is older too. 6 A rose is more beautiful than a daisy. 7 The Earth is larger than the moon. 8 A pint is less than a quart. 9 Learning Japanese is more difficult than learning Italian. 10 It's farther from New York to Austin than it is from New York to Nashville.
     • This article is about the syntax of comparative forms. For general information about comparison in language, see Comparison (grammar). For other uses, see Comparative (disambiguation). In general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as well as positive and superlative degrees of comparison. The syntax of comparative constructions is poorly understood due to the complexity of the data. In particular, the comparative frequently occurs with independent mechanisms of syntax such as coordination and forms of ellipsis (gapping, pseudogapping, null complement anaphora, stripping, verb phrase ellipsis). The interaction of the various mechanisms complicates the analysis.

2. SUPERLATIVES

   • We use a superlative to say that a thing or person is the most of a group. When we use a superlative adjective ('the tallest student') before the noun, we generally use it with 'the'. This is because there's only one (or one group) of the thing we are talking about. There is one student who is the tallest in the class and because it's clear to the listener which one we mean, we usually use 'the':
     • 1 She's the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. 2 It's the best café in London. 3 John and Lisa are the most intelligent students here. 4 This bowl is the biggest one.

3. Comparative as…as

   • We use as + adjective/adverb + as to make comparisons when the things we are comparing are equal in some way: The world’s biggest bull is as big as a small elephant. The weather this summer is as bad as last year. It hasn’t stopped raining for weeks. You have to unwrap it as carefully as you can. It’s quite fragile.

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