Abstract
The paper investigates the degrees of comparison in New Czech using two corpora of private correspondence as a material source: the corpus of contemporary private letters KSKdopisy (Hladká et al., 2005) and a preparatory version of the corpus consisting of the letters written by or addressed to poet, journalist and politician Karel Havlíček (1821-1856). Distinguishing pricipally relative and absolute meanings (i.e., comparison and elation, respectively), it tries to show that with relative meaning, the question whether using a comparative or superlative form of a quality word implies the positive presence of the quality (rather than the opposite) is (a) not to be answered generally, and (b) often irrelevant in communication.
The paper describes various relative and absolute meanings of the degrees of comparison and the clues to their interpretation. Finally, it deals with comparative and superlative forms with modified/weakened meanings.