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

comparative The degrees of comparison of adjectives and adverbs are the various forms taken by adjectives and adverbs when used to compare two entities (comparative degree), three or more entities (superlative degree), or when not comparing entities (positi ...

s or

superlative The degrees of comparison of adjectives and adverbs are the various forms taken by adjectives and adverbs when used to compare two entities (comparative degree), three or more entities (superlative degree), or when not comparing entities (positi ...

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

colour Color (or colour in Commonwealth English; see spelling differences) is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though color is not an inherent property of matter, color perception is related to an object's light absorp ...

and defect

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

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

root In vascular plants, the roots are the plant organ, 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 bel ...

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 ...

' (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 In grammar, 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" ...

, 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