Talk:Comparative/Archive 1

Examples

The rhetorical questions in the "null comparative" section aren't very encyclopedic in style. Dave 23:52, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I took some time to fix it. Haakon 19:36, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Elliptical sentences

I notice this article doesn't treat what should be done in English with the so-called elliptical sentence, e.g. "She is taller than me" or "She is taller than I".

Some people argue that there is an implicit "is" at the end of the sentence, and so only the subjective case is correct. Others argue that without the verb, "than" is a preposition, and must take the objective case.

Should this be a part of the article at all? Bigpeteb 20:42, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

There is your chance to have sex. Nothing like having a go yourself. If you can put this into the article with source citations, why not do it? Dieter Simon 23:52, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't have any sources to cite. My copy of the Chicago Manual of Style doesn't really say anything about it. I was hoping maybe somebody else knew of a non-prescriptivist source that addresses this. Bigpeteb 15:38, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I think you will find what you are looking for in the Wiki article Disjunctive pronoun, Bigpeteb. It's in the second section of that article. Dieter Simon 00:36, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Comparative case

Isn't there also something called the comparative case in certain languages? I don't know the exact mening of it though.

130.236.119.139 11:08, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Greater [city]

Yet another more recent convention appears to be that of calling a very large, often metropolitan city with all its suburbs and adjacent areas, Greater such as Greater London or Greater Manchester. This again merely denotes large or very large.

Er, does it? I’ve always interpreted it as meaning that London or Manchester is being used in a broader sense, i.e. London/Manchester plus suburbs and satellite towns, rather than only referring to the City of London or the City of Manchester. See, for instance, Manchester, Greater Manchester, Greater Manchester Urban Area. -Ahruman (talk) 14:45, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

You can call it what you like. The emphasis here was on "Greater" rather than whether it is a "city", by all means call it "urban area" for all it matters. Dieter Simon (talk) 23:16, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Ahruman has a valid point here. Greater in this context means 'broader', that is, 'including surrounding areas'. It implies a comparison to a narrower sense, such as City of X. It most certainly does not "merely denote large or very large" as the current entry claims. See, for example, Merriam-Webster. Nor is it a particularly recent convention; M-W dates it to 1882. --Jmkfi (talk) 15:21, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't quite understand what the problem is here. We are talking about the Comparative as in grammar usage here, and that "Greater" as used in geographical terms does not imply a comparison with something that is smaller in the grammatical sense. I mean, "Greater London" or "Greater Manchester" is not being compared with something that is called "Smaller London" or even "Little London", etc. The contention was that "Greater" in the geographical sense is not a Comparative in the grammatical sense, as it does not compare anything. That is all this article is about, it is not an essay in Geography. Dieter Simon (talk) 02:02, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

The article text (as quoted above by Ahruman) was confused and misleading; I have already told why. So I fixed those issues. If you now want to argue whether this Greater is a comparative at all "in the grammatical sense", that's a different issue, and the answer is not as clearly "no" as you seem to think. Morphologically, it obviously is a comparative, with its -er suffix. Semantically it definitely connotes a comparison, or opposition, to a narrower sense; it does not "merely mean large". In these grammatical respects it is a comparative. Of course, you can argue against the "comparative-ness" based on it being a highly lexicalized construction (much like Greater Antilles). But I don't see why you would want to be dogmatic about it not being a comparative at all. That's just silly. -- Jmkfi (talk) 16:30, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

I think this "Greater" is an example of what is called absolute comparative. Absolute comparative means that the comparative form of an adjective is used to express a relatively high degree, without comparison to any explicite referent.

85.231.106.122 (talk) 18:22, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

As...as

In what way are the as...as examples relevant. They don't use the comparative degree. Languages which has a special morphological form for this call it the equative degree I think. 85.231.106.122 (talk) 18:15, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Forming Comparatives

I was surprised to see that there isn't a section containing information or rules about forming comparatives. Since there are several different rules (and sometimes competing rules), it would seem prudent to add such a section. Here is a good resource: http://www.ingilizceci.net/GrammarMaryAns/Yeni%20Klasör/gramch22.html. It is fairly comprehensive, but doesn't cover all the competing rules, so other sources would be needed. Does someone have time to work on it? I haven't learned how to add tables otherwise I have something I've prepared for my 3rd grade students that could be made more comprehensive.ReveurGAM (talk) 02:09, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

This article seems to be more about the syntax of the overall construction, than about the morphology of the individual word. These are two different (though related) topics. There's a partial table at the end of Degree of comparison... AnonMoos (talk) 05:35, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

linguistic typology

There should be something on Wikipedia (in this article or another) about the cross-language typology of comparative constructions -- some languages have comparative constructions which are quite different in structure from English... AnonMoos (talk) 05:49, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Including that info here would be good (if I understand what you're saying), as long as it is verified in reliable sources. I know the article isn't particularly well-sourced now, but no need to make it worse by adding more unsourced info. Qwyrxian (talk) 05:12, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was no consensus. --BDD (talk) 22:53, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Comparative → Comparative (linguistics) – This article is only about the use of "comparative" in the context of linguistics. "Comparative" also refers to dozens of topics that are not related to linguistics, so it should be redirected to Comparative (disambiguation). Relisted Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 09:08, 19 November 2013 (UTC) Jarble (talk) 21:57, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

I support the suggestion.--Tjo3ya (talk) 23:14, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

• What are the other topics called simply "comparative"? At the disambiguation page, I see a lot of partial title matches, most of which shouldn't be there per WP:PTM. —  AjaxSmack  02:34, 12 November 2013 (UTC) A response has not arrived, so oppose as a solution looking for a problem. —  AjaxSmack  05:09, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose; per AjaxSmack, the disambiguation page shows no other thing known solely as a comparative. bd2412 T 16:06, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
• Comment a redirect should be created if this isn't renamed. Once the redirect is created, an additional hatnote for Comparative linguistics would be needed -- 70.24.244.51 (talk) 06:11, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

...and a couple of years later, I created the redirect: Comparative (linguistics). Wbm1058 (talk) 03:14, 19 November 2015 (UTC)