English Adjectives of Comparison: Lexical and Grammaticalized Uses (Topics in English Linguistics)

The book is concerned with a largely unrecognized grammaticalization process: deictification, or the development from quality-attributing to deictically used adjectives in the English noun phrase. On the basis of the synchronic and diachronic corpus-study of six English adjectives of comparison, deictification is shown to involve unstudied variants of subjectification and decategorialization.