Abstract
The article focuses on one of the basic - yet in Latin lingustics still rather neglected - grammatical categories: comparison of adjectives (and adverbs). The basic question it poses is which Latin adjectives and adverbs allow for comparative and superlative forms, and which ones do not - a question that may seem trivial to those working with modern languages but is not at all trivial to answer in the case of a dead language such as Latin that has no native speakers.
The first part of the article (sections 1-3) explains the theoretical background to the study, how the data corpus on which the research is based was created (the whole set contains ca. 10,000 adjectives that were searched for individually using the Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latin III database in all extant Latin literary texts dating earlier than the 5th century AD) and what are the limits of the material corpus. The second part (section 4) briefly summarizes the results of the analysis of the data set and attempts to extract some general principles from the analysis.