Adjectives of comparison: The grammaticalization of their attributive uses into postdeterminer and classifier uses

In this article we are concerned with English adjectives expressing 'general comparison', viz. same, identical, equal, comparable, similar, related, other, different, further, additional. More specifically, we will examine the polysemy between 'attributive' and 'referential' uses of those adjectives. The analytical distinctions and semantic characterizations we will propose come, besides from critical dialogue with the literature, in large measure from the patterns thrown up by an extended data-base, viz., approximately 2,400 examples extracted from the COBUILD corpus on the ten adjectives listed above. In section 1, we will, as a starting point of this examination, look at Halliday and Hasan's (1976) binary distinction between attribute uses expressing 'internal comparison' and postdeterminer uses realizing 'referential comparison'. We will make a first correction to this distinction by noting that some 'referential' uses are in fact classifier uses. In section 2, we will offer a further critique of Halliday and Hasan's binary distinction, both from a grammatical and a semantic perspective. If one traces grammatical properties of attributes such as equivalence with predicative alternate and gradability in the data, then it appears that attribute uses of comparative adjectives can express either 'internal' or 'external' comparison. The text-grammatical property of phoricity, on the other hand, is associated with postdeterminers aas well as classifiers. In section 3, we then propose Brebans (2002) alternative generalization for the polysemy at stake: the attribute uses are fully lexical, while the postdeterminer and classifier uses result from the grammaticalization of the lexical notions of likeness and non-likeness. This delexicalization and grammaticalization process involves a shift from expressing degrees of likeness between entities to simply identifying instances or types as 'different' or 'identical' ones to other instances or types in the discourse. In section 4, we present the quantified results of our corpus study, which we interpret in the light of the grammaticalization hypothesis. Not only does this give us an insight into the current semantic organization of the domain of comparison in English, but it also reveals the varying degrees to which the different adjectives of comparison have grammaticalized.