English Adjectives of Comparison

The book is concerned with a hitherto underresearched grammaticalization process: the development from quality-attributing adjective to determiner in the English noun phrase. It takes a bottom-up approach, based on extensive synchronic and diachronic corpus studies of six English adjectives of comparison: other, different, same, identical, similar and comparable. Their functional diversity in current English is proposed to constitute a case of layering, representing the original descriptive use,