In Semitic linguistics, the elative ( ar, اِسْمُ تَفْضِيل ', literally meaning "noun of preference") is a stage of gradation that can be used to express

comparative In general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as wel ...

s or

superlative Comparison is a feature in the morphology or syntax of some languages whereby adjectives and adverbs are inflected to indicate the relative degree of the property they define exhibited by the word or phrase they modify or describe. In languages t ...

s. The Arabic elative has a special inflection similar to that of

colour Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...

and defect

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...

s but differs in the details. To form an elative, the consonants of the adjective's

root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the sur ...

are placed in the

transfix In linguistic morphology, a transfix is a discontinuous affix which is inserted into a word root, as in root-and-pattern systems of morphology, like those of many Semitic languages. A discontinuous affix is an affix whose phonetic components a ...

' (or ' if the second and third root consonants are the same), which generally inflects for case but not for gender or number. Furthermore, elatives belong to the diptote declension. E.g. ' 'small' derives the elative ' 'smaller', ' 'new' derives ' 'newer', ' 'rich' (root ') derives ' 'richer'. However, there are several words that have particular feminine and plural forms when the elative is prefixed with the

definite article An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...

, although the agreement is not always observed in modern usage. The feminine singular in such cases takes the transfix ''CuCCā'', the masculine plural takes ''’aCCaCūna'' or ''’aCāCiC'', and the feminine plural takes ''CuCCayāt'' or ''CuCaC''. These feminine and plural forms had much more extensive use in ancient poetry. E.g. The adjective ' 'big' changes to ' in the default elative, and then ' in the feminine singular, ' in the masculine plural and ' in the feminine plural. The adjectives ' 'other' and ' 'first' also take elative forms even though they do not have comparative meaning.

References

Linguistic morphology Semitic linguistics Arabic grammar {{Ling-morph-stub nn:Elativ