Adjective Subcategories

Some adjectives don’t seem quite right with either –er or more.  That’s because they are nongradable adjectives.  Most adjectives describe features that can be placed on a continuum from one extreme to another.  We can see hot and cold as opposites with a lot of in-between points that would include warm, tepid, cool, and so on.  We can easily say that this thing is hotter than that thing or that this person is colder than that person.  We can visualize the situation as a line ranging across all possible temperatures:

               hot                 warm                 tepid                 lukewarm                 cool                 chilly                 cold

There are two types of nongradable adjectives, though, and they both include adjectives that describe features that can’t be compared easily.  The first type describes a feature that can’t be put on a sliding scale at all, and the second describes a noun that can’t be compared to anything else.

The first type of nongradable adjectives describes a feature that is an all-or-nothing situation.  For example, a person is either dead or alive.  There isn’t any situation in between the two; there is no sliding scale.  Likewise, a person is either present or absent; there is no in-between situation.

The second type puts a thing at the end point of a continuum, so that it can no longer be compared to anything else.  An example of this is when something is chief or main.  These words refer to the more general characteristic of importance; if something is the chief concern, it is the most important concern, so it can no longer be compared to the other concerns: its position has already been established at the end point of the line, and nothing can be more important than it, so it is no longer gradable in nature.

Unimportant                                Important                                         Chief

The issue of usage becomes important now.  Nongradable adjectives are definitely part of standard English usage, and English teachers may be very picky about making sure students never say or write something like: The first soldier was more alive than the second, so the doctor decided to operate on the first.  Obviously, native speakers aren’t so picky in their usage, and native speakers of English tend to think of all adjectives as gradable.  (For examples go to the movie Star Trek IV where the biologist says something like, “not only is Gracie pregnant, she’s very pregnant,” and The Princess Bride where the character Miracle Max makes the distinction between “all dead and mostly dead.”)  So using comparative and superlative forms with nongradable adjectives is grammatical, but not standard.

To see the category of adjectives divided into the subcategories just described, look at the adjective diagram at the end of the chapter.

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