Fwd: "all the faster" (in Latin too)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

a report from colorado:

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Laura Michaelis <laura.michaelis at colorado.edu>
> Date: June 27, 2005 3:06:13 PM PDT
> To: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
>
> Subject: Re: "all the faster"
>
> I'm afraid I know of no paper, in the Construction Grammar
> framework or any other, that discusses the use of 'all the faster'
> and its ilk in contexts that don't entail comparison. I quite
> frankly had never even heard of this usage, although my colleague
> Lise Menn, who grew up in Philly, is very familiar with it. Like
> Arnold, she thinks it has very limited productivity, and in
> particular that it's limited to 'bigger' and 'faster' (as in, e.g.,
> 'Is that all the bigger he's going to get?' said of a dog). For
> what it's worth, I have a paper in Studies in Language (1994, vol.
> 18, number 1) that discusses a somewhat similar semantic extension
> in Latin, in which ablative-case degree words paired with
> comparatives (e.g., quanto altius 'the higher') are used to equate
> *fixed* points on two scales, just as in English 'as...as'
> constructions. Following is in an example:
>
> Quanto altius elatus erat, tanto foedius conruit. (Livy)
> 'By the degree to which he had risen high, by that much he fell
> badly'.
>
> Compositionally, the sentence would mean 'The higher he rose, the
> worse he fell'. On this reading, the comparative words would be
> what I call 'moving standard' comparatives (as in, e.g., 'She got
> sicker and sicker'), in which comparative morphology is used to
> denote accretion of some scalar property. However, the context
> (including verbal aspect) suggests instead that that appropriate
> translation is the one I have given: what is being described is a
> single episode of falling, with a fixed 'badness' value, from a
> fixed height. In other words, the meaning of the sentence is one in
> which comparative morphology makes no semantic contribution. And in
> fact, as we might expect, we occasionally find instances of the
> 'fixed values' usage in which the comparative degree has been
> replaced by the positive in the works of Tacitus and Livy (see
> examples 11-12 in my paper), suggesting a semantic regularization
> that appears not to have happened in the English usage at issue
> (e.g., we don't find *'Is that all the big he's going to get?').
> All examples of the 'fixed degree' use of the Latin pattern date
> from Silver Age Latin, suggesting that it is an innovative use of a
> correlative pattern originally used to expressed 'linked
> variables'. Thus, it appears that the innovative use of the pattern
> 'degree word + comparative word' to express a fixed value akin to
> that expressed by 'as...as' , if that's what's going on in the
> English construction at issue, has a precedent in Latin. By the
> way, I am assuming that English 'the' in this context is
> appropriately viewed as a degree word, because it reflects an OE
> instrumental demonstrative analogous to the ablative-case 'tanto'
> of Latin --Laura