Wolfgang Kesselheim

Comparison and gradation

1. Preliminary notions All the languages of the world have at their disposal different means to express comparison and gradation, but not every language expresses them through morphology. In recent years some relevant works on the typology of comparison were published (Stassen 1985; Xerberman 1999; but see already Jensen 1934), and the semantics of comparative constructions is being investigated by semanticists. A reliable survey on comparison and gradation, however, still needs detailed research in several theoretical domains, including morphology (see, for instance, the short entries by Andersen 1992 and Crookston 1994). In the present article, then, comparison and gradation will be treated to the extent that morphology is involved, and a classification of the means employed for its expression will be sketched. Viewed conceptually, both comparison and gradation presuppose an entity that some property, state or, more rarely, a more or less dynamic state of affairs applies to. They also presuppose that this state of affairs varies on some scale on which it may, in principle, be measured; i.e. it is a parameter. Gradation (German Abstufung) then is the stepwise modification of the extent to which the parameter applies to the entity, while comparison (German Vergleich) assesses this extent with respect to some standard. Taken as a grammatical category, comparison (German Steigerung) is the formal modification of some predicative word – most often an adjective – representing a parameter of gradation or comparison, according to the extent to which it applies to its argument, relative to some standard. Similarly, gradation may be manifested in a structural category, in particular of adjectives and verbs. In a comparative construction four elements are identifiable:

Morphologie : ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung

Morphology is the study of linguistic forms, more precisely, of the inflected forms and stems of words. Consequently it is that part of grammar whose rules refer to units of at most word level. At the same time, it is also a part of the lexicon to the extent that complex stems are not formed regularly. The handbook informs the reader equally on fundamental concepts and theoretical approaches of the discipline and on morphological structures of diverse languages. Presupposing the current state of the art in morphology its goal is to represent this in a comprehensive fashion at a general level and to illustrate it with a sufficient number of examples. Priority is given to thorough explanation of established concepts and insights, complemented, if necessary, by an unbiased report on alternate problem solutions. Demonstration of contemporary trends and innovative approaches is more backgrounded.

Lexical, morphological and syntactic symbolization

Languages offer a variety of means of expression, especially for grammatical notions. Morphology, which is concerned with the combination of meaningful units into words, can only be fully understood in the context of the complete array of expression and combination types. In this article, similarities and differences among the major expression types or symbolization types syntactic, free grammatical, inflectional, derivational, compositional and lexical are described in terms of a series of continua with both diachronic and cognitive motivation (cf. 2). These continua involve phonetic, morphophonemic, grammatical and semantic criteria (cf. 3-6). The relation between the formal and semantic criteria is non-arbitrary, and thus part of the discussion will be directed toward explaining which meanings are expressed by which symbolization type (cf. 7).