A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

280 Chapter 16 Morphology: words and lexemes

(b) The 's genitive

In writing, the 's genitive is invariably formed by adding's to the non-genitive coun­
terpart - which may be a singular (woman's) or a plural that is not marked by the
·sl·es suffix (women's). In speech it has the same form and alternation as the regular
plural suffix:Jox 's, for example, is pronounced the same asJoxes.
The genitive's sounds exactly like the plural suffix ·sf.es, but there is an interest­
ing difference: the genitive does not trigger any modification of the base. The geni­
tive of wife is wife's, not *wive's - and in speech mouth 's is pronounced differently
from mouths.

6 Grade

The last of the three inflectional systems of English to consider is that of
grade, with three contrasting terms: plain, comparative and superlative. It applies
primarily to adjectives, but is found also with a few lexemes from other categories,
most clearly adverbs and determinatives. Regular forms are illustrated in [26]:

[26] ADJECTIVE ADVERB DETERMINATIVE

PLAIN cold hot rare easy soon few

ii COMPARATIVE cold·er hoft·er rar·er easi·er soon·er few·er

iii SUPERLATIVE cold· est hoft·est rar·est easi·est soon·est few·est

The plain form is identical with the lexical base while the comparative and superla­
tive forms are marked by the suffixes ·er and ·est. These begin with a vowel, which
triggers the modification of the base by the general spelling rules given in
§§3.l-3.3 above: consonant doubling with hot, e deletion with rare, y replacement
with easy.
There are a few lexemes where the comparative and superlative forms are highly
irregular, bearing little if any resemblance to the plain form. These include the fol­
lowing:

[27] PLAIN

11 COMPARATIVE

III SUPERLATIVE

good / well

better

best

bad / badly

worse

worst

much/ many

more

most

little

less

least

Good and bad are adjectives, while well and badly can be either adjectives (as in

I'mJeeling well/badly) or adverbs (He behaved well/badly).

Much, many and little are determinatives. The determinative little (as in It has

little merit) is a different word from the adjective little (as in a little creature),

which we're not referring to here: the adjective has regular inflection.^4

4 The inflected fonns, however, are now rare, smaller and smallest being usually preferred.