ted superlative adjective degree forms lend the sentence a certain rhythm and make it even more expressive :: ... fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strangest, the cunningest, the willingest our Earth ever had.transposition of other parts of speech into the adjectives creates stylistically marked pieces of description as in the following sentence :: A camouflage of general suffuse and dirty-jeaned drabness covers everybody and we merge into the background.use of comparative or superlative forms with other parts of speech may also convey a humorous coloring .: He was
the most married man I have ever known.stylistic aspect of the adjective comes to the force when an adjective gets substantivized and acquires the qualities of a noun such as solid, firm, tangible, hard, etc .: All Europe was in arms, and England would join. The impossible had happened.stylistic function of an adjective is achieved through the deviant use of the degrees of comparison that results mostly in grammatical metaphors of the second type (lexical and grammatical incongruity) .same effect is also caused by the substantivized use of the adjectives.
.6 The category of degree modifier
There is no consensus regarding the labelling of the lexical item degree modifier. The difficulty associated with the categorization and the labelling of these items are due to the complexity and fuzziness that characterize them:
· It is difficult to define the notion of degree in itself and also in relation to quantification and modality.
· The items are grammatically versatile. They appear in different forms and they are able to modify a whole range of different types of phrases.linguists seem to agree that degree and quantification are two notions that have measurement in common. The close relation between degree and quantification is evident from the labelling of degree words in previous studies. Most of linguists recognize a class of adverbs of degree which modify adjectives, adverbs, verbs and occasionally nouns.are linguists that describe the relation between degree and quantification in terms of countability and precision. Their position is that degree and quantification can be kept distinct by assigning different levels of abstraction to them. Both degree and quantification involve measurement, but they differ with respect to precision.words occur in different syntactic contexts, but they are notionally related in that they all specify a degree of some property of the element they apply to. Some degree modifiers go with a whole range of different phrases, while the use of others is more restricted. [Warren, Beatrice, p. 21-28; p. 41-62], to summarize all the definitions given above, we can conclude that:
Degree modifiers can be defined as elements which modify another element with respect to degree.
The structure of the category of degree modifier
There are both differences and similarities among the members of the category of degree modifiers. They are similar in that they all indicate a certain graded value of the item they apply to. They are different in that they indicate different values ??of some features of the item they modify. This section presents three models of the internal structure of the category of degree modifiers. [Warren, Beatrice p. 21-28; p. 41-62]
A) The scale model members of the category appear to be related to one another in a scalar fashion from modifiers which indicates highly reinforcing to items which indicate an attenuating position: completely - very - fairly - slightly. On this view the internal structure of the category of degree modifiers is comparable to the scalar structure of quantifiers, such as: all - many - some - a few - no, or to expressions of frequency, such as: always - often - sometimes -rarely - never.
B) Quirk et al et al divide degree modifiers of adjectives into two distinct groups. There are degree modifiers which scale upwards from an assumed norm (a very funny film as compared to a funny film), and there are degree modifiers which have a lowering effect in that they scale downwards from an assumed norm (a fairly long road compared with a long road) .a more delicate subdivision of amplifiers and downtoners is made into maximizers and boosters and the one hand, and approximators, compromisers, diminishers, and minimizers on the other hand.
Intensifier is a linguistic lt; # justify gt; 1.7 Degrees of comparison in Romanian
morphological stylistic degree comparison
Romanian language shares many characteristics w...
