In a sentence like, “The closer you are, the bigger you seem”. Why do we use “the” in front of closer and bigger? Neither of these seem to be nouns (though, I assume that they’re some special type of one.)
What’s the name of this formation, for an English as a second language learner to study?
Via Wiktionary:
“This is called the ‘comparative correlative,’ but it is also known as the ‘correlative construction,’ the ‘conditional comparative,’ or the ‘the…the construction.’”
From Middle English the, thy, thi, from Old English þȳ (“by that, after that, whereby”), originally the instrumental case of the demonstratives sē (masculine) and þæt (neuter). Cognate with Dutch des te (“the, the more”), German desto (“the, all the more”), Norwegian fordi (“because”), Icelandic því (“the; because”), Faroese tí, Swedish ty.
Adverb
the (not comparable)With a comparative or with more and a verb phrase, establishes a correlation with one or more other such comparatives.
The hotter(,) the better. (comma usually omitted in such very short expressions)
The more I think about it, the weaker it looks.
The more money donated, the more books purchased, and the more happy children.
It looks weaker and weaker, the more I think about it.
With a comparative, and often with for it, indicates a result more like said comparative. This can be negated with none.
It was a difficult time, but I’m the wiser for it.
It was a difficult time, and I’m {none - not any} the wiser for it.
I’m much the wiser for having had a difficult time like that.
So is this the the the the construction? Or should we just say that in the the the construction, the more the’s the merrier?
Ask The The.
The more Buffalo buffalo buffalo The The the better.
The more different language decks you use to shuffle, the closer you come to modern English.
Back when I was seriously interested in linguistics (do I believe that was more than 40 years ago), they were trying (and failing) to parse the sentence, “The more the merrier.” They were attempting to put it into the paradigm, S → NP VP, but there is neither any noun, nor any verb to be found.
I think that aspect is ellipsis:
The more [people who come] the merrier [they will be].
But it’s still an unusual construction that needs the explanation given by @Q.Q.Switcheroo above.
The closer you shave, the more you need Noxema.
Everybody knows this 1967 commercial, even people who never saw it live.
Who on earth came up with “Noxzema” as a product name? It looks like a noxious-eczema portmanteau.
It kind of smells like one, too.
Yeah, take for example ‘The bigger they come, the harder they fall’ as an example of a relatively unabridged sentence.
It’s not weirdly terse like ‘the bigger, the better’, but it’s still probably a bit weird to a non-English speaker that ‘the bigger’ means ‘as bigness tends to increase’, if they have already absorbed the concept of ‘the’ as just being the definite article; ‘the cat’, ‘the dog’.
The point is that any attempt to explain this by classing “closer” and “bigger” as nouns preceded by a definite article is going to fail.
As Q.Q.Switcheroo’s link in the second post shows, “the” in this case is not a definite article at all, it’s a completely different word that nowadays just happens to have the same spelling.
The distinction would have been clear in Old English, but as English became less inflected (that is, as word order became more important than the endings of words), we began to lose such distinctions. The word was still sometimes spelt differently in middle English but in modern times everyone forgot it had ever been different. It was by then used in only very specific contexts in English, it sounded similar to the definite article, people assumed it was in fact the definite article and so it has been spelt the same as the definite article ever since.
I think the same thing has happened in some usages of “a” such as “three times a year” - it isn’t an indefinite article there, it’s a different word that now happens to have the same spelling.
Agreed. It would probably make more intuitive sense to foreigners if it had followed the form ‘as above, so below’.
It started as a skin cream and later did brand extentions.
The story - believe it or not - "The name Noxzema is believed to have originated with a satisfied customer who reported the product “‘knocked my eczema.’”