"all the faster'

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:04 AM -0700 6/25/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>OED seems not to include this common spoken construction - no
>surprise, since I was told in junior high English that it was at
>least as revolting as "irregardless" and must never be spoken or
>written on pain of lofty disdain.
>
>I doubt that this ex. is particularly early, but it's a start:
>
>1935 Doyle Laird & Wallace Smith _Bordertown_ (film) : Is this all
>the faster this Model T will go?
>
>In other words, "as fast as."

or "the fastest".  (Note that it only substitutes for "as fast as" in
the above construction, not in e.g. "X is/drives as fast as Y".)

Unlike listmates Geoff Nunberg and Arnold Zwicky, I'm no syntactician
(nor do I even play one on TV), but I'd catalogue the relevant
construction as "all the X", where X is a comparative, not as "all
the faster" specifically; cf. "all the better", "all the odder", "all
the more",...  Of course it might be argued that these represent
different constructions, rather than examples of the same syntactic
process.

The OED does have under sense 1 of the adv. use of "the":

==========
Preceding an adjective or adverb in the comparative degree, the two
words forming an adverbial phrase modifying the predicate.
The radical meaning is 'in or by that', 'in or by so much', e.g. 'if
you sow them now, they will come up the sooner'; 'he has had a
holiday, and looks the better', to which the pleonastic 'for it' has
been added, and the sentence at length turned into 'he looks the
better for his holiday'
========

but that doesn't explain the "all" before the "the".

>How would one describe or account for the underlying grammar here ?
>Is there a syntactician in the house ?  (Goak.)

arnold, what sayest thou?  Seems like something that Construction
Grammarians might have looked at, but I don't have any on me to ask.

Larry