The default value is positive; adjectives can also have comparative and superlative degree.
The comparatives are, in general, expressed by analytical forms: ``il piú bravo'', ``il meno onesto'', ``alto quanto me''.
The relative superlative indicates the highest or the least degree of a quality in relation to something (humans or things): ``il piú bravo della classe''.
These analytical forms present encoding problems from a corpus perspective: they are not dealt with in corpus tagging practice with a word-by-word approach, since they are constructed with more than one word. They belong to the set of phenomena to be codified with the strategy of multiword expression tagging (see Leech & Wilson (1993a)).
The absolute superlative is constructed by adding the suffixes `-issimo', `-errimo', `-entissimo' or the prefixes `super-', `extra-', `iper-', etc., to the stem of the adjective: `dolcissimo', `acerrimo', `munificentissimo', `ipercritico', `ultrarapido'.
A restricted number of adjectives takes the organic comparative and superlative; such adjectives are considered as exceptions, e.g. `maggiore', `migliore',....
| Attribute | Value | It. example | It. tag |
| Degree | positive | grande (uomo) | A/ms |
| comparative | (fratello) maggiore | A/msc | |
| superlative | massimo (dolore) | ||
| grandissimo (dolore) | A/mss | ||