KOMPARACIJA PRIDEVA SA ZNAČENJEM BOJA U SAVREMENOM ENGLESKOM JEZIKU: ANALITIZAM I FREKVENTNOST UPOTREBE

Abstract

T his paper examines the contemporary tendencies in comparison of adjectives which signify colours. The adjectives of this particular group have synthetic forms of comparative and superlative, still they are commonly used in periphrastic (analytic) comparative and superlative constructions. we have examined their use in British National Corpus (BYU-BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The analysis has shown that synthetic and analytic comparisons are almost equally used. however, there is a huge variation among the adjectives of this semantic group. language speakers seem to prefer synthetic comparison with adjectives such as white or black and analytic with orange, purple or blue. Trying to identify the reasons for such differences, we have conducted a statistic analysis of linear regression with the data obtained through the corpus analysis. The absolute frequencies were taken as an independent variable (X) and probabilities of synthetic forms as a dependent variable (y). T he statistic analysis has shown that there is a strong positive linear dependency between the variables. This means that frequent adjectives are most commonly used with synthetic forms, while the use of periphrastic forms becomes more dominant as the frequency of use reduces.