Introduction

The patterns of variation in adjective comparison in a synchronic and diachronic perspective is a topic which has recently attracted a good deal of attention (see Kytö 1996a; Kytö and Romaine 1997, 2000; Leech and Culpeper 1997; and Mondorf 2002 and 2003, for a selective sample of studies). This variation involves competition between the inflectional comparative/superlative (e.g. happier/happiest), historically the older form, and the newer periphrastic construction (e.g. more/most elegant). The double comparative (more quicker) and double superlative (e.g. most delightfulest) forms were much less frequent in the history of English. They are now considered non-standard. In this chapter we will extend our analyses by considering patterns of variation in adjective comparison in nineteenth-century English, in the light of the data drawn from the CONCE corpus and, in reference to our earlier work on the topic, the ARCHER corpus (for A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, see Biber et al. 1994a and 1994b).

In our studies we have identified some of the major linguistic and extralinguistic factors constraining variation, in particular, word structure and genre. As far as word structure is concerned, we looked at word length and the nature of the word ending as major grammatical determinants influencing the variation, although there are other linguistic factors in need of consideration, as we will show later on in the present study (for earlier observations, see e.g. Leech and Culpeper 1997: 357–8, 366–9, and Mondorf 2002 and 2003).