Double comparatives: more better constructions? A comparative study of present-day Dutch and English

Details

Supervisors

Van Goethem, Kristel

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en linguistique, à finalité spécialisée: Linguistics and its Applications for a Multilingual Society

Abstract

enThis study investigates the production of so-called double comparative constructions, which combine the degree markers of the analytic and synthetic comparatives to build constructions such as 'meer sneller' in Dutch and 'more faster' in English. Although these constructions are typically viewed as non-standard, their recurrence in corpus data suggests that they are nonetheless a feature of language in use. Adopting a constructionist perspective, this paper presents a comparative analysis of the formal and semantic characteristics of these constructions in present-day Dutch and English. It does this through the use of frequency data from the nlTenTen20 and the enTenTen21 corpora. Based on this data, this paper observes that the positive forms of adjectives that are used in double comparative constructions exhibit significant variation in terms of their syllabic length, morphological structure and positive ending, and semantic type. It is then argued that some of these factors may increase the cognitive complexity of the positives, which has been hypothesised to make the production of double comparative constructions more likely. Speaker creativity is argued to be another factor influencing double comparative production, although the findings presented herein cannot confirm that this construction has already evolved into a fully licensed, E-creative pattern in the languages under study. By providing a cross-linguistic analysis of double comparative constructions, this study contributes to the field’s general understanding of double degree marking and identifies several avenues for further research into this phenomenon.