Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Adjectival Doubling Construction - 'I almost forgot the most importantest part'
- Date
- Thursday 19 March 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.30
Abstract
Sentences containing adjectival doubling constructions are relatively rare and have often been reduced to artefacts that belong to the realm of children’s language (Corver 2005) or simply mistakes (Otaki 2010, 99). Despite this assumption it is relatively easy to find examples such as:
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Hvorfor er denne her boss bare så utrolig meget mere sværere end alle andre bosser? ’why is this here boss just so incredibly much more harder than all other bosses?’ |
(LANCHART) |
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Manden foran ham var måske det mest vigtigste nulevende menneske i hele verden ‘Man-the in front of him was maybe the most importantest alive person in the entire world’ |
(Zetland) |
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Yes, it's a bit more stricter than I thought, but I can handle it! |
(COCA) |
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However the most scariest part was that she had cheated death once before in the past |
(COCA) |
In this presentation, I will share initial findings from an in-process corpus study and findings from preliminary studies of the acceptability and the meaning of the constructions. Based on the corpus study, I will argue that we cannot reduce these constructions to simply being errors but that they can be used deliberately as part of a “joking usage” (Hansen 1967) or to create a pragmatic effect (Gonzalez-Diaz 2006). Furthermore, I will argue that complexity plays an important role in predicting their occurrence (Mondorf 2009).
The pilot study of the semantics showed that participants sometimes interpreted sentences containing double comparative as expressing a superlative meaning, again suggesting that the doubling cannot be reduced to a performance error. Finally, I will argue that there could be a difference in meaning between synthetic doublings and the degree doublings where both the analytic phrase and the synthetic ending are present.
References:
- COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). n.d. Accessed September 23, 2024. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
- Corver, Norbert. 2005. “Double Comparatives and the Comparative Criterion.” Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes, no. 34 (December): 165-90.
- Gonzalez-Diaz, Victorina. 2006. “The Origin of English periphrastic comparatives” English Studies 87:6: 707-739: doi: 10.1080/00138380600768197
- Hansen, Aage. 1967. Moderne Dansk II – Sprogbeskrivelse. København: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab.
- KorpusDK. Accessed September 23, 2024 https://ordnet.dk/korpusdk
- Mondorf, Britta. 2009. More support for more-support. Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company
- Otaki, Koichi. 2010. “The Syntax-Lexicon Interface in the Acquisition of English Comparative Morphology.” In Proceedings of the 2009 Mind/Context Divide Workshop, edited by Michael Iverson, Ivan Ivanov, Tiffany Judy, Jason Rothman, Roumyana Slabakova, and Marta Tryzna. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.