Professor Reynolds and the Controversy of More/Less: Paper Accepted at Journal of Linguistics

In May 2024, Adjunct Professor Brett Reynolds published his paper "Why more and less are never adverbs" in the Journal of Linguistics, arguing that the analysis of semantic information is useful for making categorical decisions about words and their meanings. 

This interesting work is somewhat of a discovery in the field of categorization. If we had all been agreed that timber wolves and grey wolves were distinct species, for example, Reynolds in his own words has come out with data which suggests that these are actually the same type of wolf living in different territories!

To read Reynolds' succinct twitter thread explaining the phenomenon, check out his Twitter: @brettrey3.

Figure 5of Reynolds' publication,
a k-means grouping between adjectives
and determinatives (pg. 26)

To summarize, words function differently according to context: the words "more" and "less" are categorized in most dictionaries as adverbs, as they can modify adjectives or adverbs, such as in the phrase "more/less quickly." However, they can also determine nouns, and in sentences such as "more/less food" are called determinatives.

Determinatives, (Ds) thus, don't just determine nouns, but they can also modify Advs. 

So why are "more" and "less" special? 

The Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, (CGEL) refers to these two words as adverbs because they perform the same linguistic function as the comparative -er and superlative -est in ways that "much" and "little" don't. 

Reynolds disputes this distinction - you can't have "much massive," but you can have "much [and more] different." 

He suggests that you get overlaps that don't follow rigid rules because of semantic scales, and not because "much" and "more" are categorically different. 

Adjectives "prefer" different modifiers according to semantic rules such as size, similarity, and improvement.

Analyzing different adjectives and their modifiers in a corpus, Reynolds noticed an "almost perfect" split between more-adjectives (blue), much-adjectives (red), and adjectives that are more ambivalent (green).

Thus, Reynolds says that the "most thorough and consistent grammar of English," the CGEL, is only "mostly right" in their categorization of Adjs. and Ds. 

Determinatives shouldn't be listed twice, once with adverbs, and again with other Ds: rather, words like "more" and "less" are never adverbs. 

Stay tuned to see what changes come out of this publication, and weigh in with your own two cents!