Abstrakt
Comparison is an exception among Indo-European morphological categories due to its considerably limited scope. For example, data gathered from the Czech National Corpus (www.korpus.cz) give that in the highly inflected language of Czech just 6% of adjectives have degree forms, and only 3% have both degrees of comparison.
The property of being gradable depends on meaning rather than form: we can only compare scalar adjectives, i.e. adjectives that denote a quality that can be expressed on a scale. Semantics is already manifested at a morphemic level in inflected languages: both roots and affixes are carriers of meaning, and the meaning of a word is established through their combination.
Scalarity is sometimes a property of an individual adjective, but sometimes a whole adjectival type is scalar or non-scalar, i.e. the derivative affix itself makes the adjective scalar or non-scalar (e.g. the suffix of appurtenance -arius, the diminutive -ulus etc.). The present article is concerned with scalarity, and thus gradability, in the specific case of Latin adjectival compounds.
The aim is to determine which compounds are gradable, which are not, and why. Compounds are characterized as a combination of at least two meaningful components followed by a suffix, and these (i.e. at least three) elements semantically interact.
The question therefore is, for a given type of compound, which of these elements serves as a determinant of gradability. To answer this question, it is first necessary to attempt a classification of Latin adjectival compounds.
Compounds may be classified according to various criteria: semantic (e.g. the traditional distinction between endo- and exocentric compounds), morphological (based on the form of one of the components), or syntactic (based on the relation between the components). Despite scalarity being a semantic term, for gradability of adjectival compounds it proves most efficient to use a syntactic classification, based on which groups may be defined by a common approach and the analysis of which enables more general conclusions.
The language material used for this study was obtained by first excerpting all the adjectival compounds from the Oxford Latin Dictionary (the compounds being adjectives formed through a word-formative process in which the last step is composition, or "derivational composition", i.e. composition and suffixation). For each of these adjectives (and adverbs derived therefrom), an individual search was then carried out in the database Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latina III to establish whether the adjective is attested in synthetic comparative and/or superlative form, and also whether it is attested in periphrastic comparative and/or superlative form (in combination with the adverbs magis or maxime).