SYNTHETIC – ANALYTIC DRIFT IN COMPARATIVE FORMATION AS ATTESTED IN <i>COHA</i>

Abstract

Numerous studies have explored the diverse synchronic aspects of the division of labor between synthetic (inflectional) and analytic (periphrastic) comparison in the English language, i.e., the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors favoring one comparison strategy over the other (cf. Kytö, Romaine 1997; Leech, Culpeper 1997; Lindquist, 2000; Gonzalez-Diaz 2009; Matsui 2010; Park, Jeon 2011; Mondorf 2006; Hilpert 2008; Scrivner 2010; Cheung and Zhang 2016). This paper aims to investigate the phenomenon from a diachronic perspective. The paper analyzes the absolute frequencies of both free and bound comparative morphemes attached to adjectives in American English (AmE) over the last two centuries using the techniques standard in quantitative morphological typology (cf. Greenberg 1960; B. Szmrecsanyi 2012, 2016). The quantitative data on adjective comparatives are retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, 1811–2010) and further analyzed with a statistical test of linear regression (95% confidence intervals), with time as the independent variable and the calculated probabilities of occurrence of synthetic and analytic forms as the dependent variables. Our findings show that, similarly to the British English variety (BrE), the frequency of synthetic comparative forms has been increasing over time with respect to their periphrastic alternatives.