AЛТЕРНАТИВНИ МОДЕЛИ АНАЛИТИЧКE КОМПАРАЦИЈЕ У СРПСКОМ И ЕНГЛЕСКОМ ЈЕЗИКУ

Abstract

The current grammatical and linguistic literature focuses predominantly on the adverbs meaning ‘more’ and ‘most’ when the periphrastic (analytic) comparison in both Serbian and English are being described. However, both languages have additional adverbs that are used with positives to express comparative and superlative meanings (e.g. jače – najjače, more strongly – most strongly). These adverbial forms have been systematically neglected in both grammatical traditions. Moreover, there are no contrastive analyses on this phenomenon. The main goal of this paper is to contrast the lexical repertoires of the adverbs that are used as alternative models of periphrastic comparison. The paper also aims at comparing and contrasting some distributive features of these models. The research conducted here started with the independent corpus analyses of both languages. The corpus analysis of the English language was conducted on COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), whereas the corpus analysis of the Serbian language was conducted on КSSJ 2013 (Korpus savremenog srpskog jezika). We opted for independent corpus analyses in order to avoid the potential negative outcomes of working on parallel corpuses (i.e. that the use of a form found in L2 is directly motivated by a form used in L1). After the separate corpus analyses, we conducted a theoretical contrastive analysis. The results presented in this paper will show that the adverbs with the identical semantic features are used in alternative models in both languages. In addition, the paper shall reveal that these models do manifest more or less different tendencies when it comes to their distribution.