English Grammar Questions
Q13: Building comparative and superlative of the adverb
"simply"
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| From V.
S - New Zeeland "... I had a discussion with my colleges at work on this subject. This is an example of adverb when 'y' is changed to 'i' and then adds 'er' and 'est': 'easy - easier - easiest'. The adjective, 'simple' is OK regarding the degrees of comparison it takes: 'simple - simpler - simplest'. What about the adverb? Is it correct to say: 'simply - simplier - simpliest'? According to the spelling tool, this is not OK. This means, the adverb 'simply' does not have comparative and superlative or it becomes adjective in this gradation[sic]?" Most of our readers consider that English grammar is not so difficult to handle; all you have to do is, search for few good grammar sites on the Internet, and you will solve, quickly and for free, all problems you have. It doesn't work that way, dear readers. The Internet is a ... it is full with stupid, trivial "things". You will never find true "knowledge" for free on the Internet. The only good thing about the Internet is, it helps us discover the books, or the documents we need. Further from there, you have to pay; we all do. Another problem is the "spelling tools" we use. Dear readers, any software grammar check will work in 90% of all instances--this is, regardless of how good a software grammar check tool is or may be. The rest of 10% are incorrect instances, because they are based on "meaning": no software tool will ever manage to understand the English meaning appropriately. Therefore, great caution is strongly recommended when you rely only on software to correct your messages. The question above may appear simple, but it is very complex. It would take us one hour of studying LSEG, and then another hour to write the appropriate answer. Yes, we do study LSEG for correct answers just as anybody else, because English grammar is no joke. Therefore, our answer to V.S. was fairly brief and abrupt, as follows. The first thing we do when we perform grammatical analysis is, we look at the meaning of the words and sentences. The "meaning" is the first and the most important reference in English grammar. Following, we use morphology, and then syntax, to finalize our investigations. It is important to highlight that English adverbs have two forms: 1. adjectival (easy; sure; cold; hard; slow) 2. adverbial (easily; surely; coldly; hardly; slowly) However, not all adverbs have both forms: some have only one form, either adjectival or adverbial. Please be very careful when using the adverb, because there are adjectives and even nouns having exactly the same forms as adverbs do. The second thing you need to know about adverbs is, there are few very important rules regarding two consecutive adverbs: one of them has to be in adjectival form. Please read LSEG for details and examples. The third important aspect is, not all adverbs form "degrees of comparison". In addition, there are few adverbs which have the "superlative" embedded in their meaning, therefore they do not form, again, degrees of comparison. Note that using the English adverb correctly is very difficult. There are many well-known authors, having tens of books published, which do not use the adverb correctly. The fourth important aspect is, the adverbs form their degrees of comparison according to the following rules: 1. synthetic comparison (or the Saxon one) for monosyllable adverbs plus "early" 2. analytic comparison (or the French/Norman one) for polysyllable adverbs In LSEG are presented about ten groups/categories of exceptions to the above rules. As a note, LSEG has been specifically "designed" to be easily understood. That means, all grammatical mechanisms presented are the essence of simplicity, and right to the point. The last difficult aspect related to using adverbs is about their position within the sentence structure. Again, the best thing is to study LSEG. In addition, LSEG explains all orthographical changes after adding specific endings to nouns (the -s of the plural), to adjectives (the -er and -est), to adverbs (the -er, -est, and -ly) and to verbs (the -ing form). As you can see the topic is indeed complex; therefore our advice to V.S., and to you, is buy LSEG and study it for a couple of years. After that, you are going to be an expert in English grammar. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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