comparison in English

English has two grades above the plain form and marks them twice over. The suffixes are real inflection and are the reason this record reads explicit rather than periphrastic: tall becomes taller and tallest, and no auxiliary or particle is involved. Beside them stands an analytic series, more and most before the base, which does the identical work for a different set of words. A handful of high frequency adjectives suppletes outright, so good, bad and far take better and best, worse and worst, further and furthest, and those forms have to be learned rather than derived.

The split between the two series is conditioned by the shape of the base and not by what it means. A word of one syllable takes the suffixes, a word of three or more takes the analytic series, and words of two syllables divide by their ending and by frequency, with some admitting both and a few admitting neither comfortably. This is a phonological and lexical condition on a grammatical choice, and the two series are not in free variation: applying the suffix to a long adjective is ungrammatical rather than merely unusual, and doubling the two is ungrammatical in the standard variety though it was normal in earlier stages of the language.

The downward and level grades are handled differently again, by less and least on the one hand and by an as construction on the other, neither of which has any suffix. The obligatoriness is recorded as conditioned because the marking applies only to a gradable adjective or adverb: a non-gradable word refuses both series, and no noun or verb is graded at all.