Korean Job Discussion Forums

[VirginIslander]

Head Teacher caught me off guard today.

Can we use the expression "more simple" instead of "simpler."

If so, when?

Example: The invention of the light bulb made life "more simple" or "simpler."

Thanks in advance

[faster]

Sure, but "simpler" is more idiomatic. "More simple" would only be natural as a form of emphasis:

"HA! Your puzzle is so simple."

"Oh yeah? Well yours is MORE simple."

Or alternately, "more simple" could be put to excellent use to mimic David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap fame:

"See, some bands play 3 chords, some bands play only two chords, but I only play ONE chord...it's so simple...how much more simple could it be? None more simple."

[richardlang]

[Novernae]

In normal use, simpler is correct and follows the regular rules. However, in cases of emphasis you could use more simple.

[Woland]

I ran a corpus search at the Compleat Lexical Tutor website (Google that name, as spelled for a lot of useful information on teaching and learning vocabulary) and got the following results. In a corpus of 4 million words, mixed British and American English, spoken and written production, 32 examples of 'simpler', 0 examples of 'more simple'.

I had expected at least 1 'more simple' because it can be used contrastively, as a number of people mentioned, but it appears to be very rare. But I moved on to Google, which gave me just more than 44 million hits for 'simpler' and just more than 1 million for 'more simple'. Of course, it has to be understood looking at Google hits that not all of them represent exactly what you are looking for. Some of the ones for 'simpler' are for a statistics software program by that name and some of the ones for more simple are for books with titles like "More Simple Science Experiments". But let's assume a ratio of 44:1 holds out, confirming the rarity of 'more simple'.

I did discover one more situation in which people may tend to use 'more simple' in looking through the Google hits - to preserve parallelism. I found one example like this:

"I would like to know why apparently more simple, more flexible, more
resistant engines, like Turbines or Jet engines did not impose themselves in the [car] industry."

All this leads to a pedagogical question. It seems clear that the absolutist rule about forming comparatives and superlatives that we teach learners is a lie. IT is clear that native speakers of English have a choice in many cases over which form to use. Yet we know very little about the actual conditions under which the seeming exceptions are produced (I had never thought about the issue of parallelism until I saw this example). How can we teach the formation of these structures without lying to students and teaching them not English, but only something which resembles English? This question applies to other grammatical 'rules' as well.

[ontheway]

Google gives more than 3,000,000 hits for "bestest" as in "my bestest friend." Is Google the new grammar?

[Woland]

[faster]

2 great posts, Woland. Teachers would be wise to read them carefully.