The Superlative Alternation in Present-Day English

Overview & Synopsis

This dissertation investigates the alternation between synthetic (-est) and analytic (most) superlative forms in English through a two-part empirical study. The first part is based on a large-scale questionnaire examining the influence of social and speaker-related variables such as variety, age, gender, and education, alongside linguistic and complexity-based factors at phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic levels. The study also explores morphosyntactic persistence, assessing how preceding patterns of gradation influence subsequent variant choice. Multifactorial analyses reveal systematic interactions between social and linguistic predictors, supporting the hypothesis that the cognitive facilitation strategy known as more-support (Mondorf 2009) extends to the superlative, while highlighting the limits of a purely complexity-based account. The second part complements these findings with a corpus-based study grounded in usage-based construction grammar and exemplar-theoretic assumptions. Drawing on the GloWbE corpus (US and GB sections), it examines superlative alternation with focus on the morphophonological properties of the adjective, frequency effects (type and token), un-prefixed adjectives (e.g. happy vs. unhappy), and the processing and representation of complex forms (holistic vs. decomposed). Cross-varietal and comparative analyses reveal usage patterns that contextualize and extend the questionnaire findings. From a methodological perspective, the dissertation’s central contribution lies in the triangulation of elicitation and usage data, demonstrating how a multimethod approach enriches our understanding of grammatical variation and morphosyntactic alternations. By integrating controlled elicitation with authentic corpus evidence, the study illuminates the cognitive, linguistic, and social mechanisms underlying superlative strategy choice and provides both theoretical and methodological insights for future research on grammatical variation.