"all the faster" (in Latin too)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 28, 2005, at 11:29 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> ... I think there's also a pragmatic element that can override the
> lexical semantics.  If I'm lowering some shelf, or whatever, my
> companion can ask me to lower it a bit more and I could reply (if I'm
> a speaker of the relevant wider dialect) "That's all the lower it
> will/can go".  Let me googlify this intuition...yup, here are a few,
> some including pricing rather than literal height:...

nice observations.

erik thomas's discussion of the grammar of the construction (in
frazer's "Heartland English") is very short -- only two pages.
thomas accepts a certain number of examples not in cleftoid contexts,
though they all strike me as very odd:

18.  An hour's all the longer that show lasts.
20.  I'm going all the faster I can go.
21.  I tried all the harder I could.
22.  He's washing dishes all the more quickly that he wants to.

(22 suffers from the periphrastic comparative as well as the non-
cleftoid context.)

thomas also accepts this comparative with a "than" clause (and i don't):

16.  That's all the bigger than an apple they get.

thomas notes that superlatives can take simple adverbs as modifiers,
but this comparative cannot:

14.  That's the very prettiest she can be.
15. *That's all the very prettier she can be.

[note: the examples are thomas's, not mine.]

(here, this comparative is like comparison with "as": *That's as very
pretty as she can be.)

and he notes that this comparative can't be used with "much", though
the superlative and "as" comparison can:

23.  That was   the most /as much as   we could do.
24. *That was all the more we could do.

something i've just noticed that also differentiates this comparative
from the superlative and "as" comparison is external modification:

  That was almost   the loudest /as loud as   she could sing.
*That was almost all the louder she could sing.

but enough of random observations...

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)