COMPAR Comparatives

MFTE COMPAR

Definition

Comparative adjective and adverb forms (-er, more/less + adj/adv).

Detection Rules

mfte

MFTE comparatives (APPEND): (1) JJR/RBR POS tags, (2) morphological -er matching with exclusion list for non-comparative -er words, (3) “worse”, (4) analytic “more/less + JJ/RB”. QUAN excludes needed because MFTE’s QUAN consumes “more” before COMPAR. AMP excludes for “altogether” etc. consumed by amplifiers first.

p1 
cql[pos="JJR|RBR"]
p2 
cql[word=".*er" & pos="JJ|RB" & word!={words_exclude}]
p3 
cql[word="worse" & pos="JJ.*|RB.*"]
p4 
cql[word="less|more"] [pos="JJ.*|RB.*"]
combine: (p1 | p2 | p3 | p4) & !QUAN & !AMP
Words: exclude (22 items)
after altogether bitter clever eager either ever hyper inner never order other over premier proper queer rather sinister sober super together utter

Requires: word, pos

Normalization

Per words

Sources

  • mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
  • biber_2006 — Biber, Douglas (2006) : University Language — A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers

Notes

Also includes analytic comparatives (more/less + adj/adv).

View YAML source