Because "lesser" is mostly employed as an adjective (lesser mortals,
etc),
whereas "less" is often an adverb, when it comes to choosing which word
to
pick to modify an adjective in an adjective phrase, maybe speakers tend
to
choose the one which is more adjective-like.
Interesting that the most used is the exact reverse of what used to be
considered correct (cf. will/shall--which is more random than a
reversal)
Yorick Wilks
On Thursday, February 10, 2005, at 02:33 PM, R.M.Salkie@bton.ac.uk
wrote:
> Google found 39,500,000 instances of "less used" and about 3,940,000 of
> "lesser used"; many of the latter were instances of "Lesser Used
> Languages"!
>
> The BNC has 12 occurrences of "less used" and two of "lesser used".
> The
> two instances of "lesser used" both form part of an attributive
> adjective
> phrase:
>
> lesser used depots
> the smaller lesser used remedies
>
> None of the 12 examples of "less used" is attributive. Typical are:
>
> one which was less used
> pesticides are less used than they were
> Why do you think that direct file organization is less used than some
> other
> file organization techniques?
>
> (The search also found several instances of "less used" with a
> voiceless s,
> meaning "accustomed", as in: "Is it that men are simply less used to
> looking after themselves").
>
> Other (rare) instances of "lesser" with a passive participle in the
> BNC are
> also attributive, e.g.
>
> the lesser studied Andean view of history
> lesser developed countries
> the lesser known eastern valleys
>
> Because "lesser" is mostly employed as an adjective (lesser mortals,
> etc),
> whereas "less" is often an adverb, when it comes to choosing which
> word to
> pick to modify an adjective in an adjective phrase, maybe speakers
> tend to
> choose the one which is more adjective-like.
>
> Raphael Salkie
> University of Brighton
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] On
> Behalf Of Somers, Harold
> Sent: 10 February 2005 00:42
> To: mt-list@eamt.org; CORPORA@UIB.NO
> Subject: [Corpora-List] Lesser (sic) used languages
>
> Sorry for cross-posting, but I just saw an announcement for a
> conference on
> "Lesser Used Languages & Computer Linguistics", which looks like an
> interesting conference, but (the point of this posting), does anyone
> else
> cringe when they see "lesser used"? Shouldn't it be "less used"?
>
>
>
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