Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 January 10
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January 10
editgrammatical aspect of "the more...,the more..."
editGood evening, I would like to know the grammatical aspect of "the more...,the more...", please ? Thank you in advance.2A01:CB0C:38C:9F00:CDD4:2336:1EF3:78FB (talk) 20:50, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
- I'm not sure what you mean by "grammatical aspect", but I believe that the the in such an expression is descended from Old English þȳ (ðȳ), the instrumental (singular, masculine and neuter) case of the definite article sē. The example given in the OE primer I have at hand is "ðȳ māra wīsdom on lande wǣre, ðȳ we mā geðēode cūðon" ("The more languages we know, the more wisdom there will be in the land"). Deor (talk) 21:24, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
- It is indeed a baffling question. (Are you really asking about grammatical aspect here?) -- Hoary (talk) 22:22, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
- I don't think the question is about grammatical aspect. One can find the term "parallel comparative" used for this construction, for example in the Cambridge Preparation for the TOEFL® Test. In some languages the two "the"s aren't identical, e.g. "quanto... tanto..." (or "altrettanto...") in Italian and "je... desto..." in German. Maybe this can help find another more commonly used term for "the more... the more...", "the louder... the better...", etc. As in Deor's old example, the two parts can use different tenses, but that doesn't make the whole thing special in terms of grammatical aspect. ---Sluzzelin talk 22:53, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
- As for the construction in English, the term used for it in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (pp 1135–1137) is the correlative comparative construction. It has various syntactic complexities: the treatment in CGEL twice shades into blue ("specialist passages", as explained on p xii). -- Hoary (talk) 00:02, 11 January 2020 (UTC)