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English: Comparative and sentence stress | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 1 of 5 06 January 2012 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This is something that stumped me while writing in another thread.
I'm a native speaker of German, so forming the English comparative and superlative with -er/-est is more intuitive for me than using more/most. I can use both, of course; I rarely have to pause and think which one is correct - and those adjectives and adverbs are usually ones that can take either form, depending on the speaker's accent. I am aware that easier is considered the correct form. Nontheless, when I wrote that sentence I did not even consider 'comparatively easier' as an option. (It was meant to be a joke when I said I can't decide which one to change.) What Elexi said might be a reason, but I grew up with German style, and I'm not afraid of repeating myself. I can't see why I should be trying to implement style advice English students get when I make fun of the outcomes thereof. Googling "considerably easier" gave me close to 2mio hits and "considerably more easy" almost 5.3mio hits. Using comparatively it's 290k vs 55k, more occurrences for easier. I doubt this is purely an ESL phenomenon. The second adjective is modified by an adverb. When I try making clauses like that, I use the synthetic comparative for all monosyllabic adjectives (comparatively hotter, considerably cheaper etc) but I want to use the analytic comparative for disyllabic adjectives when the adverb has more than two syllables itself. When I try saying the clause using -ier, it doesn't sound wrong, but I don't like the way it is stressed; it sounds muddy and difficult to understand. Does anyone have any idea where this might come from? Btw Cainntear, my 'grammar archive' refuses to accept 'commoner' and 'commonest' as forms I might use, even when they may be considered correct. It is afraid that commoner as a comparative could be confused with the noun, and in its words: 'the commonest cause - what do you want me to make out of that, the communist cause?!' 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 5 07 January 2012 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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As a native English speaker in this specific context your sentence sounds fine to my ears. Using "easier" in the second position also sounds fine, but to my ears it has a subtly different emphasis..
If you were to remove the word "comparatively", then you should definitely change "more easy" to "easier". I think that the word "comparatively" sets up a context where you are comparing one easy thing to another easy thing and you are emphasizing that one easy thing is more easy than the other easy thing. So when you want to emphasize the comparison you can't really write "easier", so to put emphasis on the "-er" you need to decompose "easier" into its components so one of those components can be singled out for emphasis. Anyway, that's my half-baked theory on the subject. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 5 07 January 2012 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The British National Corpus says
easier : 5815 easiest : 772 more easy: 36 most easy: 7 Corpus of Contemporary American English easier : 24664 easiest : 3021 more easy : 87 most easy : 8 The classically "correct" forms are definitely still the current standard. It may be that that's changing, but for now, the safe option is conservatism. As for commoner -- I didn't say commoner, I said "commonest". It's a weird one -- "commonest" feels OK to many folk, but "commoner" doesn't (because of the noun, as you said). Still, "most common" is the most common form by a long way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 5 08 January 2012 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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fiziwig, that's probably what was going on inside my head.
Cainntear, those numbers are nice, but they don't say anything about possible interaction with other parts of a sentence. It would be nice to know if any of those occurences was modified by an adverb, and if, how many syllables that adverb had and where it's stressed. About "commonest" - I meant to say that I am aware of my accent, so I try to avoid using words that could cause a misunderstanding. This even plays a role in my choice of words in written conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 5 08 January 2012 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Then have a nose about the corpuses at [url=http://corpus.byu.edu/] and have a look at the context yourself. In the case of the BNC, most of the hits "most easy" and all of the hits for "more easy" are in simple contexts without adverbs. I'm not going to check the COCA just now, so you're welcome to give it a go yourself. (If you're not familiar with corpus linguistics, you're in for a treat. Once you can use a corpus, there's a hell of a lot you can learn about any language.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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