Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words

It seems that adjectives formed with either ‘-y’ or ‘-ly’ are able to take ‘-er’ and ‘-est’.
However, unlike the case of the ungradable adjectives, we can express comparative
and superlative notions with morphologically complex adjectives using degree adverbs
more and most:

(102) more beautiful most beautiful
more American most American
more fortunate most fortunate
more edible most edible
more sunken most sunken
more smiling most smiling

These are known as the periphrastic comparative and superlative constructions as
opposed to the inflectional ones. Often it is the case that adjectives participate in either
one or the other of these constructions, though there are some adjectives that can
appear with both:

(103) bigger more big
reliabler more reliable
wiser more wise

We need not go into this any further. The main point that concerns us here is that
the less productive nature of these adjectival morphemes makes them less reliable as a
test for adjectival status than we have seen in the case of verbs and nouns. Obviously,
if a word can appear in a comparative or superlative form, it is an adjective, but failure
to do so cannot automatically lead us to a negative conclusion.
Another morpheme closely associated with adjectives is -ly. This is used with a
large number of adjectives to form adverbs:

(104) nice nicely
brave bravely
black blackly
erroneous erroneously

There is some debate about the status of this morpheme which revolves around the
central issue of our present discussion. On the one hand, -ly might be taken as a
derivational morpheme which is applied to a lexical item of one category to derive
another lexical item of another category. This would be similar to morphemes such as

• er in cook-er, -ic as in scen(e)-ic or -ment in govern-ment. We have not been
  concerned with such morphemes so far as they tend to be rather restricted, applying to
  certain lexical items of a given category rather than to the category as a whole. There
  are, for example, no forms exister (someone who exists), viewic (the property of
  resembling a nice view) or *rulement (the collective body of people who rule). As we
  have been concerned in using morphological observations for identifying categories,
  the derivational morphemes would have been only of limited use to us. The important
  point about derivational morphology is that it takes place in the lexicon, forming new
  lexical elements from others, prior to any grammatical operation. If -ly is a derivational
  morpheme, then adverbs are a different category from the adjectives they are derived
  from. However, we have no feature analysis for adverbs using the [±F], [±N] and [±V]