Abstract
Comparison of adjectives (and adverbs) is a grammatical category that has thus far received scant attention in Latin linguistics. Latin grammars (with few exceptions, cf.
Pinkster, 2005, 47; Kühner - Holzweissig, 1912, 565-6; Neue - Wagener, 1891, 245-6) treat comparison as a category applicable to all adjectives and omit entirely the question of which adjectives can be compared and which cannot for semantic reasons. Nevertheless, data from modern languages show that the category of comparison of adjectives (and adverbs) is actually highly limited.
Based on an extensive excerption of Latin texts (the employed corpus comprises more than 10,000 items marked as adjectives in the Oxford Latin Dictionary and all their occurrences throughout the database Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latina III), a rough estimate gives that comparative or superlative forms (synthetic and/or periphrastic) are attested in Latin in approximately 14% of adjectives, while both degrees are found in about 7% of adjectives. According to Pinkster and Kühner - Holzweissig, one of the semantic classes where comparison is excluded for semantic reasons is that of "adjectives with negative meaning".
The Oxford Latin Dictionary contains 566 adjectives with the negative prefix in-. Of these 26.1% are attested to be gradable, which means that the proportion of attested gradable negative adjectives, contrary to the claims of the grammars, is actually higher than the proportion of attested gradable Latin adjectives in general.
That being the case, this study aims to give a more convincing account of the gradability of negative adjectives than that afforded by the brief statements on this topic in Kühner - Holzweissig and Pinkster.