In English grammar, an absolute adjective is an adjective, such as supreme or infinite, with a meaning that is generally not capable of being intensified or compared. Also known as an incomparable, ultimate, or absolute modifier.
I saw a list depends on this matter such as person can’t be more or less dead. In the same way, a sphere can’t be more or less round.
Thereby, I found,on the same list, a lot of words which can be graded, such as furious, obvious, huge, tiny, by adding an adverbs like extremely, too, very.
- Extremely furious, he stormed my house sith a gun, trying to shoot everyone sitting over there.
What is your explanation for this condition, that why we couldn’t use adverbs with adjectives, huge, furious, tiny…etc?
Best Answer
There are two kinds of "absolute adjectives", and everybody seems to lump them together.
The first kind are adjectives which essentially have very in their definitions. For example, the definition of furious could be taken to be extremely angry or very angry.
For these, it doesn't make any sense to say slightly furious, because the adverb slightly contradicts the definition of extremely angry. For some reason I don't completely understand, we also tend not to use adverbs like very or extremely with these adjectives, but we can use a number of near-synonyms of very — for example, absolutely furious and truly furious are both grammatical. And while I might recommend saying angrier rather than more furious (although Google shows that a lot of people do use it), I think even more furious is fine.
The other kind of "absolute adjective" is a category that pedants seem to have invented, that doesn't reflect actual usage very well. These adjectives supposedly don't come in degrees. For example, these pedants say things are either dead or alive, complete or incomplete, pregnant or not pregnant, unique or not unique, infinite or finite. People tend to ignore these pedants and say a little bit pregnant, very unique, somewhat complete. I wouldn't worry about this second kind — if you think it makes sense to use slightly, very or more with these, go ahead and do so.