Segun Ige
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Comparatively speaking, adjectives are a word class that, after the noun, appears simple to describe, determine and detect. Sometimes, in English, very simple things could be very problematic. It is not surprising, then, that students who don’t have an English background, upbringing, or who are not even exposed to good English teaching say that “they hate English” chiefly because they do think that language is static – the ‘two-plus-two-always-equals-four’mathematical mentality. But that’s not the case in English.
What are comparative adjectives? Simply, comparative adjectives are adjectives that compare the physical attributes, nature of things, ideas, and so on, of people, animals, and inanimate objects.For example, if John is academically sound and I wish to compare him, on the basis of his superb performance, with his classmates, I may say that “John is the most intelligent in the class”. Further, I see two cows and indeed one of them looks stout and heavily fed by the farmer, I may decide to compare it with the other which looks haggard and thin by saying, from a few distance away, “that cow is bigger than the one beside it”. Or that there are two very intimate female friends with striking characteristics thus: “Faith is obviously ‘more intelligent’ than Patience, but the latter is surely ‘more beautiful’ than the former”.
So, it is obvious from those examples that monosyllabic adjectives normally form their comparison by the inflectional suffix, “-er”, e.g., “big ~ bigger”, “brave ~ braver”, “tall~ taller”. Many disyllabic adjectives can also do so, for example, “noisy ~ nosier”, “friendly ~ friendlier”, “costly ~ costlier”.So we can have “… bigger than…”, “… friendlier than…”, and so on. As for the latter, which are actually more than one syllable, they could also form their comparison as such: “… more noisy than…”, “… more friendly than…”, “… more costly than… “. That is to say that unlike most monosyllabic adjectives, disyllabic adjectives have the alternative of periphrastic forms:
1) My jokes are friendlier than yours, or
2) My jokes are more friendly than yours.
This is largely owing to the fact that “disyllabic adjectives” adjectives that can alternatively take the inflectional morpheme, “-er”, are those ending in an unstressed vowel, specifically, syllabic /l/, or /ә(r)/. That is, the word “costly” is pronounced as /kɒst. li/, particularly with the ultimate syllable “/li/” functioning as the weak syllable with the present of the syllabic “/l/”. The point is because of the present of this syllabic consonant /l/, which is necessarily the syllable that occurs last, we can have the periphrastic comparative form “costlier” other than the normal “more costly”. Lovely, isn’t it?
By the way, I was with a female friend and she told me she would like to leave his parents and start living alone. I said, “You are becoming maturer”. She quite frowned upon that rather unspoken comparative adjective, “mature”, and consequently, she looked up the word in her phone dictionary and discovered it’s an existing word. To be sure, it sounds fairly inelegant to say “I am maturer than you”. But mind you, it is just a similar way of saying “I am friendlier than you”. Yet another way of saying the same thing, we could cast the sentence as such – “I am more mature than you”. It cannot be the commoner expression “*I am more matured than you” in that “mature” is originally an adjective. It would however be very right to say “Esther is more experienced than Mary” because the adjective “experienced” was derived from the noun “experience” and can therefore be a “participial adjective”. This is the faulty analogy that necessitates the erroneous, but not Nigerian, usage of “*… more matured…” for “… more mature…”.
