Structure
The structure of a comparative in English consists normally of the positive form of the adjective or adverb, plus the suffix -er, or (in the case of polysyllabic words borrowed from foreign languages) the modifier more (or less/fewer) before the adjective or adverb. The form is usually completed by than and the noun which is being compared, e.g. "He is taller than his father", or "The village is less picturesque than the town nearby". Than is used as a subordinating conjunction to introduce the second element of a comparative sentence while the first element expresses the difference, as in "Our new house is larger than the old one", "There is less water in Saudi Arabia than in the United States", "There are fewer people in Canada than in California."
Some adjectives and adverbs that deal with the concept of distance use the modifiers further and furthest (or farther and farthest) instead of more, for example, "The boy ran farther away" or "The expedition was the farthest up the river ever recorded".
Comparison normally applies only to gradable adjectives and adverbs, not to ungradable ones like dead and unique.
Read more about this topic: Comparative
Other articles related to "structure":
... In terms of literary structure, Revelation consists of four visions, each involving John “seeing” the plan of God unveiled, with an epilogue that concludes the book ... In terms of content, the structure of Revelation is built around four successive groups of seven the messages to the seven churches the seven seals ...
... Since the structure is cubic, as described below, the thermal contraction is isotropic - equal in all directions ... The structure of cubic zirconium tungstate consists of corner-sharing ZrO6 octahedral and WO4 tetrahedral structural units ... of the polyhedral units that make up the structure, and lead to contraction ...
321 kinematic structure is a design method for robotic arms (serial manipulators), invented by Donald L ... robots, such as the PUMA, have a kinematic structure that deviates a little bit from the 321 structure ...
2 ... Loving-kindness living Boaz and Ruth are models of an altruism for which the word "loving-kindness" has been coined (approximately translating Hebrew hesed) ...
... The cover of each issue serves as the first panel to the story ... Gibbons said, "The cover of the Watchmen is in the real world and looks quite real, but it's starting to turn into a comic book, a portal to another dimension." The covers were designed as close-ups that focused on a single detail with no human elements present ...
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“The question is still asked of women: “How do you propose to answer the need for child care?” That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: “If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?””
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)