Talk:relative

Categorial status of relative to

@Victor Bob asks at Talk:later whether relative to may be a preposition. One test is to see whether it functions as a non-predicative adjunct. I find the following examples in the NOW corpus:

1. Relative to much of Western philosophy, there is something peculiar in the Confucian attitude.
2. Relative to the mandate he had, there’s a lot more that could have been done.
3. Relative to the amount of people who experience miscarriage, there’s a tiny amount of money that goes toward it.
4. Relative to how precisely officers watched their words when it came to race, there was something wild and unstable about the use of sexual and sexist language.
5. Relative to say a country of the size of Scotland versus New Zealand, there were thousands of deaths, sadly.
6. Relative to December 2019, there are nearly 100,000 fewer clients on Ontario Works and 20,000 fewer income support cases in Alberta.
7. Relative to a couple of months ago, there is much clearer evidence of labor shortage, there are more and more pervasive supply bottlenecks, commodities and future commodities prices are rising,
8. Relative to the preceding quarter, there was an increase of 1.71 percentage points.
9. Relative to bonds, there is a bear market building up even in big U.S. stocks.

Such examples are rare -- I find these 9 in 18.4 billion words of text, though others will be there -- but these all seem fine to me. Brett (talk) 10:49, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Got it. Thank you! Victor Bob [talk] 10:52, 4 January 2024 (UTC)