Timeline for Superlative and definite article "the"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
4 events
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| Apr 16, 2014 at 2:57 | comment | added | David M W Powers | For every 100 linguists there's 101 theories of grammar, all of them wrong;-) I'm actually a Computational Linguist/Psycholinguist - my focus is how language works and is learned and the different structural levels, and how to model it. The nominal levels we call phones, morphs, words, phrases, clauses, sentences can actually collapse in which case the same segments can play different roles at different levels, as I allude to here. Also the same word, or cognate forms, or different pronunciations, can develop to mark different (reduced or extended) semantic and syntactic usages. | |
| Apr 16, 2014 at 2:24 | comment | added | jimsug |
@DavidMWPowers : I'm not sure about that - as far as I know, noun phrases can't take adverbs as adjuncts, since that's only possible at the verb phrase level. I'm a linguist by trade, so I use the properties of the sentence, and the location of the word, as criteria for the part of speech, rather than the orthographic form it takes, which can be misleading and often contradictory. Having said that, I'm now thinking that in both cases, latest is part of a noun phrase embedded in a prepositional phrase: [at] the latest [time], with the being elided in the (a), and at and time in both.
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| Apr 16, 2014 at 2:07 | comment | added | David M W Powers | Actually "the latest" or "the latest time" is still adverbial (an adverb of time). Arguably "latest" is still an adjective in both usages, even though it functions as an adverb in the first and a noun in the second. Same if you replace "latest" by "last" where the second sentence becomes even more awkward sounding. Prescriptivists sometimes say that you shouldn't use "firstly" or "lastly" because "first" or "last" are already adverbs but I disagree: as sentence level adverbs the -ly version is about sentence utterance/writing time; without -ly it is about whatever time is relevant. | |
| Apr 9, 2013 at 23:45 | history | answered | jimsug | CC BY-SA 3.0 |