Exercises
I. Re-express the content of the following in a
more natural way using comparative or
superlative constructions.
i The extent to which my dad is big
exceeds the extent to which yours is.
ii Brian is the swimmer who is ranked top
in the world as regards speed.
iii That is afish that is ugly beyond the
ugliness of any fish I have ever seen.
iv I wish I had a degree of intelligence that
outstrips what I actually have.
v The extent to which you are a good gui
tarist would increase if the time you
practised were to increase.
- Underline all the comparative clauses (and
nothing else) in the following examples (all
from Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Alice in
Wo nderland and Through the Looking
Glass).
It was as much as she could do, lying
down on one side, to look through into
the garden with one eye.
ii 'But then,' thought Alice, 'shall I NEVER
get any older than I am now?'
iii 'If everybody minded their own busi
ness,' the Duchess said in a hoarse
growl, 'the world would go round a deal
fa ster than it does.'
iv This piece of rudeness was more than
Alice could bear: she got up in great
disgust, and walked off.
v It was evidently more than he could
manage by himself; however, she man
aged to shake him out of it at last.
- Using variables as appropriate, give the
primary and secondary terms in the com
parisons expressed in the examples below,
following the model used in the commen
tary on [3 -4] in the text. (For example, if
we gave The hotel fe lt more comfortable
than my own home did, you might write
Exercises^203
"The hotel felt x comfortable [primary
term]; my own home felt y comfortable
[secondary term]".)
Fido can run a lot fa ster than Rex.
ii We 're hoping to finish as early as
tomorrow.
iii More people came to the meeting than
we had seats fo r.
iv The meeting lasted longer than
expected.
v Yo u can take as many copies as you
need.
vi More people believed that it was gen
uine than that it was a hoax.
vii He had a more powerful motor-bike
than I had had.
viii Jill thinks Ed's better off than he is.
ix Jill thinks Ed's better off than he does.
x I got up later than usual this morning.
- Compare the following examples:
i She knows fa r more people than I know.
ii She 's the kindest person I know.
The underlined expression is a compara
tive clause in [i] but not in [ii]: what kind of
a clause is it in [ii]? What grammatical evi
dence is there for assigning I know to dif
ferent subcategories of subordinate clause
in the two examples? Show how the differ
ence ties in semantically with the distinc
tion we have drawn between term compar
ison and set comparison.
- Same occurs in (among others) the con
structions illustrated in the following:
She stayed in the same hotel as we
stayed in.
ii She stayed in the same hotel we stayed
in.
Describe the syntactic difference between
these constructions and explain why the
examples have the same meaning even
though they are syntactically different.
