Tham khảo tài liệu 'teaching academic esl writing part 24', ngoại ngữ, toefl - ielts - toeic phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 218 CHAPTER 9 Nongradable adjectives refer to everything-or-nothing qualities of nouns either you are total or you are not . For the same reason nongradable adjectives cannot be used with the intensifying adverb very or have sentence predicate functions and occur after linking verbs . For example The new project is more potential main and very right principal. COMPARATIVE AND SUPERLATIVE DEGREE OF ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS IN ACADEMIC WRITING Comparative and superlative degree adjectives have the function of comparing nouns . big difference bigger difference . Comparative superlative degree constructions can have a small number of syntactic constructions of which three are prevalent in academic writing 1. Comparative superlative degree forms with the markers -er est 2. Phrasal comparatives with more most . more most complex 3. Structures with comparative clauses than and as . as The report is longer than I expected it to be . The prices for commodities are not as high as analysts predicted them to be . For monosyllabic adjectives as well as two-syllable adjectives with -y -ly or -le endings comparative and superlative degrees are marked by -er and -est and discussed in practically every grammar textbook . hot hotter hottest pretty prettier prettiest . In academic writing comparative degree adjectives with -er are far more prevalent than other comparative constructions. In addition academic writing in general employs more comparatives than other types of writing such as fiction or news Biber et al. 1999 . Other comparative degree adjectives adhere to a phrasal pattern with more most adjective . more accurate most prominent . Like -er comparative forms more and most phrases are also found more frequently in academic text than any other. In addition to the more most comparative and superlative degree adjectives all adverbs with the -ly suffix also take more most forms of comparative and superlative degrees. Such adverbs are far more numerous than those that .
