The development of adjective and adverb grading in Romanian
Affiliations
Faculty of Letters, University of Pitești, Str. Gh. Doja 41, 110253 Pitești, Romania
History
Received April 28, 2014
Accepted June 29, 2014
Published January 13, 2015
Abstract
The comparison of adjectives and adverbs has been described following the directions of evolution in Vulgar Latin, as well as the integrative trends in the context of the Romance languages, but without a detailed analysis. Leaving apart the theoretical goals, the present study is based on an updated understanding of the concepts involved in the category of grading, according to which it describes language constructions in the first three centuries texts. The main goal was giving examples of language constructions for the following types and subtypes of structures and elements: degrees of intensity (positive, intensive and absolute superlative), degrees of comparison (comparative of equality, comparative of superiority, comparative of inferiority and relative superlative); comparative semi-adverbs and means of expressing the comparative adverbial, as well as the extension of this syntactic position at the complex sentence level. After pointing out some regressive experiments, we tried to make a detailed and thorough correlation between the norms in the periods that were studied and the norm of contemporary standard Romanian.
Copyright
© 2015 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.