영어 형용사 굴절에 관한 연구

The Inflection of English Adjectives

This paper intends to describe and generalize the inflection of English adjectives. The structure of English was profoundly affected by the leveling of unstressed vowels. The adjective in Old English, like that in Latin, agreed with the noun it modified in gender, case, and number; but Germanic had developed a distinctive adjective declension - the weak declension, used after the two demonstratives and after possessive pronouns, which made the following noun definite in its reference. Like the demonstratives, the weak adjectives did not vary for gender in the plural. The strong declension was used when the adjective was not preceded by a demonstrative or a possessive pronoun or when it was predicative. The genders of the plural forms were different only in the nominative-accusative. The comparative of adjectives was regularly formed by adding -ra, and the superlative by adding -ost and -est. The old English comparative ending -ra became -re, later -er and the superlative suffixes -ost and -est fell together as -est. If the vowel of an adjective was long, it was shortened before these endings though the analogy of positive form frequently caused the original length to be restored in the comparative and superlative forms.