The Comparison of Adjectives in English in the XV and the XVI Century (Classic Reprint)

Preface. The following dissertation deals with the comparison of adjectives in English in the middle period of development. The fifteenth and the sixteenth century represent the transition from Middle to New English, when forms and spellings are being fixed, and the fate of many new constructions determined. A systematic survey of the morphological and syntactical facts connected with the history of adjective comparison in these centuries is necessary to a complete history of adjective comparison in English, a history which may well be worked out century by century. Further, such inquiry should help to fix chronologically the shifts of meaning in certain irregular or anomalous comparatives and superlatives, and the development of certain new forms. Throughout, two things have been kept steadily in mind, the relation of the forms and constructions discussed to those in preceding centuries, to Old Eng Ush and Middle English, and, second, their relation to the fonns and constructions found in Shakespeare and later English. Shakespeare, coming at the close of the sixteenth century, marks the terminus ad quern of the period here treated. Frequent reference is made in the following to Franz s Shakespeare Grammatik, a book which is indispensable to the student of Elizabethan English.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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