Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2010, Page 130

128 Hjalmar P. Petersen
In the Table 10 below, we see that analytic comparatives were found
to be most frequent with compounded adverbs. Note, however, that they
were also found with words that Faroese has inherited from Old Norse
(cognates), confirming the claim made by Höskuldur Thráinsson et al.
(2004) that the analytic comparative is spreading in colloquial Faroese.
This indicates that in terms of analytic comparatives (and superlatives,
see below), Modern Faroese is more advanced than Icelandic.
INHERITED adjectives DERIVED ADJ. with -andi DERIVED ADJ. with -lig loanwords compounds
types 37 32. 35 34 87
tokens 57 80 58 43 120
Table 10: Typesand tokens ofanalytic comparatives in in the corpora F0royskt
TekstaSavn (FTS) and FAE_SOSIALURIN.
This picture does not suggest any clear difference in the use of analytic
comparatives with different types of adjectives (inherited, derived, loan-
words, compounds). With analytic superlatives we get essentially the
same picture, as shown in Table 11:
INHERITED adjectives DERIVED ADJ. with -andi DERIVED ADJ. with -lig loanwords compounds
types 37 32 35 34 87
tokens 57 80 58 43 120
Table 11: Types and tokens of analytic superlatives in in the corpora F0royskl
TekstaSavn (FTS) and FAE_SOSIALURIN.
The figures indicate that analytic comparatives and superlatives are quite
common in Modern Faroese.
In the judgment task the subjects were asked to evaluate the sentences
in Table 12. Again, the informants had four possibilities to choose from,
as described above in 3.1. The adjectives tested were the frequent and
inherited word sjúkur ‘sick’, the simple adjective neyvur ‘exact’ and the
derived adjective fittligur ‘nice’ (containing the suffix -lig). The results are
summarized in (8), beginning again with the sentences that received the
highest ratings (ratings 1 (‘the sentence is completely correct’) and 2 (‘the