How can I make comparisons with these adjectives: "right", "dead", "wrong" and so on?
In short, you can't. These are non-gradable or non-comparable adjectives. In most usages, you either are or are not right, dead, or wrong. Other such adjectives are alive, pregnant, daily, medical, perfect, extinct.
Most non-gradable adjectives can sometimes be compared. Dead is sometimes used as a comparative in the idiomatic phrase deader than a doornail (or dead as a doornail). In a complex moral or ethics issue that has no clear-cut answer, one might say that one position is more right or more wrong than another, without saying that one position is (absolutely) right or wrong. Informally, we can say that a woman who is 8 months pregnant is more pregnant than one who is 3 weeks pregnant, but in more formal usuage pregnant is a non-gradable adjective.
|