Correlation between the gradability of Latin adjectives and the ability to form qualitative abstract nouns
Abstract
Comparison is distinctly limited in scope among grammatical categories in that it is unable, for semantic reasons, to produce comparative and superlative forms for many representatives of the word class to which it applies as a category (adjectives and their derived adverbs). In Latin and other dead languages, it is non-trivial to decide with certainty whether an adjective is gradable or not: being non-native speakers, we cannot rely on linguistic intuition; nor can a definitive answer be reached by consulting the corpus of Latin texts (the fact that an item is not attested in the surviving corpus obviously does not mean that it did not exist in Latin).
What needs to be found are properties of adjectives correlated with gradability/ non-gradability that are directly discernible at the level of written language. The present contribution gives one such property, showing that there is a strong correlation between gradability and the ability of an adjective to form abstract nouns.