Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Grammar Puzzle: The More, the Merrier

11/26/2018

19 Comments

 
My ninth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Swisher, immersed our whole class in diagramming sentences. She invited us to bring in long, intricate sentences—one from Darwin ran a page and a half—to diagram as a class, sometimes covering the two full chalkboards on the front and side walls of the classroom.

Lately it’s the short sentences that have me puzzled:
  • The more, the merrier.
  • The sooner, the better.
  • The higher you fly, the farther you fall.
  • The clearer a lake, the more crowded its beaches.
These are clear, correct, full sentences, whether or not they contain subjects or verbs. Their defining feature is a pair of phrases or clauses, each starting with “the” followed by a comparative adjective or adverb. It turns out grammarians call them comparative correlatives or the “the . . . the” construction.

Who cares? Probably only those of us who learned to love grammar with teachers like Mrs. Swisher. If that's you, I’ll welcome your solutions as I continue to puzzle over this odd structure. When the isn’t a definite article—as it isn’t, in this construction—what part of speech is it? Given that the first and second phrases aren’t interchangeable, what’s their relationship? And how on earth do you diagram “The more, the merrier”?
19 Comments
Rich Heiberger
11/26/2018 09:19:37 am

If you are hungry, there is food in the refrigerator.

Question: what is the state of the refrigerator if you are not hungry?

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Rich Heiberger
11/26/2018 09:26:53 am

The higher you fly, the farther you fall.

I think that's the canonical form.
I worked translate it into a diagramable sentence
If you fly high than you fall far.
I think higher and farther are nominalised adverbs. And therefore "the" is a definite article.

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Sarah link
11/26/2018 03:16:09 pm

Rich, "The higher you fly, the farther you fall": I think this "the . . . the" structure requires parallelism between the two parts, a comparative term in each part, and causation or correlation that's very hard to express any other way. What I'm finding online about nominalized adverbs gives examples that either add a word part (e.g. "ation") or use something as a noun that originally wasn't. (Fictional detective Nero Wolfe complained about people using the verb "contact" as a noun.) I'm not sold on "higher" and "farther" being nouns. What's the evidence beyond "the" coming before them? When I try to formulate a conventional sentence that truly keeps the same comparative meaning, I wind up with math: "There's a causal correlation between how high you fly and how far you fall," or "How far you fall is a function of how high you fly." I do agree that, as in your translated version, "The higher you fly" is the subordinate or dependent clause, and "the farther you fall" is the independent clause.

As for the "If you are hungry" sentence, which is neither comparative nor parallel, I'll turn old-fashioned and call it colloquial, informal, and incorrect in formal usage. I use it all the time but would edit it out of anything worth editing.

Allan Gibbard link
11/26/2018 05:27:53 pm

I don't know what to say about "The higher you fly, the further you fall." But let me comment on the next message: I'm familiar with sentences like "There's food if you are hungry" as "biscuit conditionals", after an example by J.L.Austin. There's quite a bit of discussion of them by philosophers and linguists. I see from Google that they are more formally called "relevance conditionals," and Google tells me that there is a lot published on them under that name. Even usual conditionals like "If he's there, he came very recently" don't tell you what's the case if the antecedent is false, but a contrast is indicated by putting the conditional forth as relevant. Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson have a book Relevance; I recall that in a seminar, a psychology graduate student said there are better treatments of relevance, but I don't remember what they are. (I'm not coming up with the name of the graduate student, but I do remember that she has achieved considerable prominence since she was auditing my seminar.)

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Sarah link
11/26/2018 09:15:50 pm

Allan, thanks for the introduction of biscuit conditionals! (Great name.) I hadn't heard of these but am actually pleased to learn this usage is respectable after all, since I use it a lot. "If X [you're hungry] then Y [there's food]" means"if X, then Y is relevant" - as distinct from the more usual "if X, then Y is true." (In neither case telling anything about Y if not X.) I like it! Thanks for broadening my horizons. I may still avoid it in formal writing for a while.

Matt Cook
12/17/2018 12:08:33 pm

At least the sentence isn't wrong... it just doesn't cover as much ground as it could. Even worse, they teach us in logic class that the statement "if A then B" is [vacuously] true whenever A is false. Which leads to obviously wrong sentences like "If you live on the moon, then you live in Chicago" being considered "true". Luckily, philosophers have already addressed this, including a book with my favorite first-sentence-of-a-book of all time: " 'If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over' seems to me to mean something like this: in any possible state of affairs in which kangaroos have no tails, and which resembles our actual state of affairs as much as kangaroos having no tails permits it to, the kangaroos topple over." -- David Lewis, Counterfactuals (1973)

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Sarah link
12/17/2018 09:03:18 pm

Vacuous indeed! Which leads me to wonder what makes a sentence count as "wrong." Inherently impossible, like the moon/Chicago one, or more broadly failing to say what the speaker/writer clearly intends? I think the main reason the "hungry/refrigerator" sentence isn't wrong is that "if" has a different meaning from formal logic's "if A then B." Actually "if" has a number of meanings in addition to the "truth" and "relevance" ones. There's the escalating comparison "And if you think last winter was bad, this year they're predicting three feet of snow." And the courteous request "If you'll step into my office for a minute, there's a problem you should know about." And probably others.

Rebecca link
11/26/2018 04:47:19 pm

Thank goodness for Mad Libs, fill in the part of speech laughs and Spanish for the great grammar lessons they gave! -Rebecca

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Sarah link
11/26/2018 08:49:21 pm

Great sources for grammar! Hopefully all taken with a smile, if not a grain of salt. One source of fallacious English grammar "rules" is the nineteenth-century assumption that Latin was the standard against which other languages should be parsed.

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Matt Cook
12/18/2018 12:05:20 pm

"The more, the merrier" could mean the more you give someone at Christmas, the merrier you will make them feel. But this is not its meaning. I do not feel that this is a complete sentence. It is just a clue to a complete sentence, in fact, it is a set phrase. It may feel complete, like "Because I said so!" can feel very complete, but grammatically it is lacking in obvious ways. I think these are partial sentences that only make sense because we know how to fill in the rest. Consider one where you don't know the rest: "The sooner, the more fundamentally." As a sentence, it sounds incomplete to me. Even if I tell you it means "The sooner you start studying a topic, the more fundamentally you will learn it", the abbreviated version just sounds to me like some words are missing. Similarly, "The more, the more" doesn't sound like a tautology; it sounds like gibberish. So I am not convinced that these are proper sentences.

Strangely, only the first part can be expanded with a "that" (which can help clarify the underlying grammatical structure): "The more that I eat, the more I drink" sounds pretty much ok, but a "that" in the second part doesn't seem to work so well. Not sure why that is.

How jarring was it that the last sentence in the previous paragraph was not a complete sentence? Probably not very, because it was obvious how to fill in the missing part. To me, these comparative correlative sentences are similar, when they omit the subject and/or predicate. Of course the full form, "The more I eat, the more I drink", is a fine comparative correlative sentence.

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Richard M Heiberger
1/2/2019 06:35:59 pm

Here is the Disney solution:

We are Siamese if you please....
We are Siamese if you don't please.

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Sarah link
1/3/2019 08:12:20 am

Funny, as an illustration of two more meanings of "if." Thanks, Rich! Funny in a different way to remember what Disney considered fit fare for white American children to grow up on.

Sarah link
1/3/2019 08:26:27 am

Matt, sorry I missed this comment earlier. I'll grant "the more, the merrier" has elements of an idiom. "The sooner, the better" also needs context, though given context (e.g. making an appointment) the meaning can be entirely clear while any exact words "clarify" the second half seem awkward and only muddy it.

Even the larger form with verbs - "The more I eat, the more I drink" - doesn't easily fit the parsing or diagramming we were taught in ninth grade. What is the role of "the" in each half? If "I drink the more" is the independent clause, what does "the more [that] I eat" modify? The complexity seems to me still to be there with or without "that." Adding "that" makes the relation between "I eat" and the first "the more" explicit, without changing the relationship between the two halves of the sentence.

Grammar as I was taught it didn't provide for this type of sentence, though it is certainly grammatical by the two tests of clarity and usage.

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Steve Speake
2/3/2019 03:02:23 pm

"The more, the merrier." Well, let me give this a try. This sentence seems to me to be quite elliptical. It seems to be an abbreviated form of "The more there are, the merrier we will be." In a sentence diagram, as you're probably aware, Xs are used to indicate omitted words. Also, it seems that the first "the" in this sentence is an adjective modifying "more." The second "the" seems, to me, to be a relative adverb. SO, to diagram, "The more, the merrier," just act as though you are diagramming "The more there are, the merrier we will be," using Xs for the words that do not appear in the elliptical (abbreviated) sentence. I believe the second "the" is a relative adverb, so it would go on the usual dotted line connecting the clauses. After I submit this comment, I'll try to send you images of the diagrams I'm talking about, via your "contact" link. Remember--I'm new at this, and I could be very wrong in the suggestions I've provided.

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Sarah link
2/3/2019 04:11:17 pm

Thanks, Steve! Your email came through; I'm sorry the blog interface doesn't lend itself to diagrams for others to see here. I'm in no position to say you're wrong - as my post indicates, I'm still exploring possibilities. How I wish we'd taken this sentence to Mrs. Swisher back in junior high. When she couldn't answer our diagram questions, she took them to her university professor, Dr. Bishop. Unfortunately neither is still alive.

What intrigues me most in your construction is treating the second "the" as a relative adverb. It's a possible answer to the core question that still puzzles me: the relation between the two clauses in a "the-the" construction. I'm pleased to see Merriam-Webster lists the use of "the" as an adverb, not exclusively an article. Other examples of relative adverbs that I'm finding online can be expanded to prepositional phrases and introduce subordinate clauses that modify nouns (e.g. "where" in "the house where I live," equivalent to "the house in which I live).

Webster's notwithstanding, I wonder if "the-the" isn't a closer parallel to correlative conjunctions like "neither-nor" than to relative adverbs like "where." Neither "the" has any meaning alone. "The more [there are]" and "[we will be] merrier" are two separate clauses, however elliptical, and I'm not persuaded either clause modifies the other.

Thanks for the food for thought.

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Steve Speake
2/6/2019 03:52:07 pm

Thanks, Sarah, for taking the time to comment on my comment & email. If I gain any more insight to this thorny issue, I'll let you know. I appreciate people who appreciate the intricacies and nuances of language.

shujiro yano
8/8/2020 10:33:25 pm

Dear Ms.

I understand that as for 'The higher you fly, the farther you fall.'
the formal form is 'You fall the farther,the higher you fly.'
In the form of ''The higher you fly, the farther you fall.' , the first 'The' is called a relative adverb meaning 'to whatever extent' and the second 'the'is called a directive adverb meaning 'to that extent'

To any extent you fly high, to the extent you fall.


I have never found any other example of such relative adverb as 'the'.
On the other hand 'the' as directive adverb is typically used like ' She She will feel all the better for a good night’s sleep.'
In this sentence 'all' is adverb meaning 'very much' and 'the' is suggesting 'for a god night's sleep'.

At lease this is what I leaned at highscool in Japan.


br pls

s yano

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Sarah link
2/7/2019 07:28:42 am

Please do, Steve. It's been fun and you've given me some new insights. Isn't language amazing?

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Gururaja
5/28/2020 02:26:44 am

Hello Sarah, I just came across your article. Excuse me if this issue is now stale for having received a solution, but the article in the URL below addresses your query very well.

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/11/the-more-the-merrier.html

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 


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