Page 54 - DENG103_English - I

Unit 5: Parts of Speech: Adjective and Preposition

Occasionally, the comparative or superlative form appears with a determiner and the thing Notes
being modified is understood:
• Of all the wines produced in Connecticut, I like this one the most.
• The quicker you finish this project, the better.

• Of the two brothers, he is by far the faster.

Less versus Fewer

When making a comparison between quantities we often have to make a choice between
the words fewer and less. Generally, when we’re talking about countable things, we use
the word fewer; when we’re talking about measurable quantities that we cannot count, we
use the word less. “She had fewer chores, but she also had less energy.” The managers at
our local Stop and Shop seem to have mastered this: they’ve changed the signs at the so-
called express lanes from “Twelve Items or Less” to “Twelve Items or Fewer.” Whether
that’s an actual improvement, we’ll leave up to you.
We do, however, definitely use less when referring to statistical or numerical expressions:

• It’s less than twenty miles to Delhi.
• He’s less than six feet tall.
• Your essay should be a thousand words or less.
• We spent less than forty dollars on our trip.
• The town spent less than four percent of its budget on snow removal.

In these situations, it’s possible to regard the quantities as sums of countable measures.

Taller than I/me?

When making a comparison with “than” do we end with a subject form or object form,
“taller than I/she” or “taller than me/her.” The correct response is “taller than
I/she.” We are looking for the subject form: “He is taller than I am/she is tall.” (Except
we leave out the verb in the second clause, “am” or “is.”) Some good writers, however,
will argue that the word “than” should be allowed to function as a preposition. If we can
say “He is tall like me/her,” then (if “than” could be prepositional like like) we should
be able to say, “He is taller than me/her.” It’s an interesting argument, but—for now,
anyway—in formal, academic prose, use the subject form in such comparisons.
We also want to be careful in a sentence such as “I like him better than she/her.” The
“she” would mean that you like this person better than she likes him; the “her” would
mean that you like this male person better than you like that female person. (To avoid
ambiguity and the slippery use of than, we could write “I like him better than she does”
or “I like him better than I like her.”)

More than/over?

In the United States, we usually use “more than” in countable numerical expressions
meaning “in excess of” or “over.” In England, there is no such distinction. For instance,
in the U.S., some editors would insist on “more than 40,000 traffic deaths in one year,”

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