Tham khảo tài liệu 'the grammar book teacher course part 104', ngoại ngữ, ngữ pháp tiếng anh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 728 The Grammar Book 3. Separation of fewer from the head noun encourages the use of less less than 50 people 4. Ellipsis of constituents following lessor fewer encourages the use of less . fewer is rarely used pronominally They told us 300 people would come to the rally but we had less. Chen s results are reinforced by the fact that less occurs in all syntactic environments where a negative comparison is possible Adjective to be less extravagant than Adverb to dance less gracefully than Verb to weigh less than Noun less money than But fewer erm only occur in the last environment with nouns and then only if the noun is countable and plural . fewer dollars than . Thus fewer seems to be a suppletive11 form of less that can occur only as a modifier of plural countable nouns. Chen speculates that because less can encode a smaller-than-other quantity with no regard at all for countability and plurality while fewer must explicitly take these features into account it is sometimes hard even for native speakers to use fewer and this is especially true when the modifier and the head noun are not adjacent. Use of -Er Versus More Solomon 1994 compares the use of naturally occurring tokens of inflected -er and periphrastic comparatives in spoken American English and finds that periphrastic more is being used in many cases where the -er form is expected. Some of the discourse-sensitive reasons she has isolated to explain this are the following 1. The speaker changes from the inflectional form to the periphrastic form because she he needs to emphasize the positive comparison one can stress more but not -er My instructor told me to come up with a clearer thesis statement but I don t see how I can make it any MORE clear. 2. Periphrasis is used with the base form in some cases where the positive form of the base word occurred in the preceding clause no special emphasis It s easy to catch this disease. It s more easy to catch than AIDS. 3. Some collocations frequently occur .
