Book Description

Excerpt from The Comparison of Adjectives in English in the XV and the XVI Century The following dissertation deals with the comparison of adjectives in English in the middle period of development. The fifteenth and the sixteenth century represent the transition from Middle to New English, when forms and spellings are being fixed, and the fate of many new constructions determined. A systematic survey of the morphological and syntactical facts connected with the history of adjective comparison in these centuries is necessary to a complete history of adjective comparison in English, a history which may well be worked out century by century. Further, such inquiry should help to fix chronologically the shifts of meaning in certain irregular or anomalous comparatives and superlatives, and the development of certain new forms. Throughout, two things have been kept steadily in mind, the relation of the forms and constructions discussed to those in preceding centuries, to Old English and Middle English, and, second, their relation to the forms and constructions found in Shakespeare and later English. Shakespeare, coming at the close of the sixteenth century, marks the terminus ad quern of the period here treated. Frequent reference is made in the following to Franz's Shakespeare Grammatik, a book which is indispensable to the student of Elizabethan English. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.