70 CHAPTER 2. VERB GRAMMAR
cate explicit comparative:
A:
......
B:
A:
B:A: ”I am looking for a cheap umbrella.”
B: ”A cheap umbrella you said? What about this one?”
A: ”Ah, that’s a nice umbrella. But I was wondering whether you
had an even cheaper one.”
B: ”Ah, I’m sorry but we do not have any umbrellas cheaper than
this.”In this conversation, is used to ask for an even more ”cheap”
item, but only after it has been established that the item in question is (al-
ready) cheap. An example of incorrect use of would be:
A:If we were to translate this sentence, it would say ”This umbrella is a
bit expensive. Do you have an even cheaper one?” This is clearly incorrect
use of language, as we can only ask for an even cheaper item if the present
one is already cheap.
Thesuperlative, in English the ”most ...” version of an adjective,
is formed in Japanese by prefixing the word
to the adjective, which
literally means ”first”, in the context of a ranking:
McLaren
”The fastest car (here) is that McLaren.”Remember that this is an adjective construction and that re-
quires an adjective to turn into a superlative. Many students new to the
language will use without an adjective, and end up saying things
like
or
, which would literally mean ”most teacher” and
”most car”. These sentences are not grammatical in either Japanese or En-
glish, since they lack amodifierto explain exactly what these nouns are
the most of. Usually when this mistake is made, all that is missing is the
adjective , meaning good:
creates the superlative ”best”.