The adjective and its stylistic functions

Analyse the stylistic implications of the adverbs used in the following excerpt.

E. Hemingway – In Another Country

Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone to the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and t hen we did not any of us know how it was going to be afterwards. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it anymore.

General lexico-grammatical meaning of adjectives is that of qualitativeness. Qualitative adjectives are always estimative, that is why they are used as epithets (picturesque' view, idiotic shoe-laces, crazy bicycle, tremen­dous achievements) and can form degrees of comparison. The only grammatical category of the English adjective today is that of comparison. Comparison is only the property of qualitative and quantitative adjectives, but not of the relative ones.

Relative adjec­tives normally do not form degrees of comparison and serve as logical (non-stylistic) attributes (red colour, Italian car, dead man). However, they may be occasionally transposed into qualitative. Such transposition imports origi­nality and freshness in speech: This is the reddest colour I've ever seen in my life; "Ferrari" is the most Italian car which you can meet in this remote corner of the world; Carry was the deadest men ever present in that ambitious society. Expressiveness of adjectives may be as well en­hanced by non-grammatical transpositions in the formation of the degrees of comparison, when well-known rules of their formation are intentionally vio­lated: My bride was becoming beautifuller and beautifuller: You are the bestest friend I've ever met.

When adjectives that are not normally used in a comparative degree are used with this category they are charged with a strong expressive power.

Mrs. Thompson, Old Man Fellow's housekeeper had found him deader than a doornail... (Maugham)

In the following example the unexpected superlative adjective degree forms lend the sentence a certain rhythm and make it even more expressive:

...fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strangest, the cunningest, the willingest our Earth ever had. (Skrebnev)

The commercial functional style makes a wide use of the violation of grammatical norms to captivate the reader's attention:

The orangemostest drink in the world,

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