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In the last week I asked here on ELL two questions:

  1. How can these two types of adjectives be distinguished terminologically?

  2. Why can “low” become “lower” and “lowest”, while “up” can't?

The answer for the first question is "inflectionally gradable for comparison and analytically gradable for comparison".

The answer for the second question as I understood by reading all the answers there, is that the word "up" is not an adjective and therefore it should not be gradable. But when I see Cambridge dictionary we can see that there is an adjective which is called "up". In addition in the same dictionary the word "upper" is marked as adjective. (and the word "lower" is marked there as a opposite. unlike the most of the answers in the second post). So it confuses me because I'm not sure if the word "up" is gradable or no.

Then my question is: Are there adjectives that are non gradable at all?

Virtuous Legend
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2 Answers2

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Sure. For example wooden in wooden spoon.

You can't (at least ordinarily) have a woodener or woodenest spoon.

We can say He divorced her but not He's divorceder.

Jim Reynolds
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  • He the **most divorced** person I have ever met. – Mari-Lou A Apr 29 '18 at 09:12
  • *The same study did find, however, that the annual incomes of divorced women were greater than the incomes of women who were still married, a finding at least partly attributable to the fact that* [***more divorced*** *than married women are employed full time.*](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-YwsDr3fW1cC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=%22more+divorced+than%22&source=bl&ots=pQkIyOr3cP&sig=1XSglVM1Tvg9B4TCfILUw1qpuNg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi8rfbkkt_aAhVwzlkKHQygCHQQ6AEIMzAD#v=onepage&q=%22more%20divorced%20than%22&f=false) – Mari-Lou A Apr 29 '18 at 09:17
  • The adjective *divorced* has two syllables and it doesn't end in "y", therefore it would not take the -er suffix of monosyllables such as "tall" or disyllables such as "happy". – Mari-Lou A Apr 29 '18 at 09:21
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    ① In *He divorced her*, the word *divorced* is a verb and not an adjective. ② In *more divorced than married women are employed full time*, the adjective *divorced* is not gradable. Rather, the number of divorced women is being compared to the number of married women. Try a *very* test instead: *\*very divorced* is unacceptable unless you can come up with a context permitting a novel interpretation of *divorced* with a semantic dimension along which the meaning can be graded; *He is the most divorced person I have ever met* would presumably require such a context. –  Apr 30 '18 at 07:35
  • @snailboat My comment was to show how the to make the comparative and the superlative adjective "divorced": more divorced--->most divorced. The offered version *divorceder* is ungrammatical (you're right to point out that divorced in "he divorced" is a verb). One is either divorced or not, one is either pregnant or not, but native speakers do say "very pregnant". So I wouldn't be surprised if someone who had been divorced more than five times was described as being "very divorced". If nothing else, "more/most divorced" is grammatical (perhaps not idiomatic, but that's a separate issue). – Mari-Lou A May 05 '18 at 07:24
  • @snailboat I didn't receive a notification when you posted your comment, I was just browsing by. – Mari-Lou A May 05 '18 at 07:30
  • Those are some of the adjectiviest comments I've ever seen. – Jim Reynolds May 06 '18 at 04:22
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I think your question is basically asking about comparative and superlative adjectives.
While

low, lower, lowest

exists

down, downer, downest

does not.
In the same way

high, higher, highest

exists, but

up, upper, uppest

does not.

Perhaps this might help you: Comparative and Superlative Adjectives

Peter
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