English adjectives of comparison lexical and grammaticalized uses - Breban, Tine 1980- (De Gruyter Mouton, 2010)
Includes bibliographical references and index
The book is concerned with a largely unrecognized grammaticalization process: deictification, or the development from quality-attributing to deictically used adjectives in the English noun phrase. On the basis of the synchronic and diachronic corpus-study of six English adjectives of comparison, deictification is shown to involve unstudied variants of subjectification and decategorialization.