In East Asia, the more the merrier

This paper will discuss various strategies employed by the languages of East Asia in the so-called comparative correlative constructions. Comparative correlative constructions express situations where a change in degree in one phenomenon leads to a change in another. In English these are expressed using the ‘the…the’ construction, as in ‘the more the merrier’, ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’, etc. Different languages code these constructions in different ways, even though there are frequent similarities in the structure on the syntactic level, especially in Western Eurasia (den Dikken, 2005 provides ample examples), Dixon (2008, p. 811) hints at these similarities being of genealogical or areal origin. East (and Central) Asian languages exhibit a wide variety of strategies of marking such constructions which will be discussed and compared in this paper. These do differ from patterns seen in many Indo-European languages, where the first clause starts with a relative pronoun, and the second with a demonstrative pronoun as in the Czech ‘Čím víc gólů dame, tím víc bodů máme.’ This variability makes them interesting also from the typological point of view. Some Asian languages use rather straightforward strategies using double particles of degree, such as Manchu/Sibe (and other Tungusic languages such as Kilen or Udige), or Chinese.

1. Eli yawe-m(e) eli saxurum

   ptc go-cvb    ptc cold

   ‘It gets colder the further we go.’ (Sibe, Zikmundová, 2024, p. c.)

Some outliers, such as Ewenki, employ comparative suffixes. 

2. D'u-duk goro-tmor-it hoktoron silimku-tmar bi-cho-n.

   house-abl far-cmpr-instr path narrow-cmpr be-pst-3sg

   'The farther from the house the narrower was the path.' 

(Ewenki, Nedjalkov, 2014, p. 121)

Others, such as Japanese employ a rather more unusual construction where the verb/adjective first appears in a conditional converbal form, and then the same verb/adjective appears again in an adnominal form (in Japanese identical to the finite verb form) modifying a particle of degree. This can be followed by a different adjective or a whole clause. A surprisingly similar construction can be observed in Korean.

3. Tabere-ba tabe-ru      hodo                oishii.

   Eat-cond eat-npst    measure             tasty

   The more you eat the tastier it gets. (Japanese)

This paper will argue that the typological profile (basic word order, dependent- or head-marking, etc.) of the languages in question plays only a limited role in the choice of the strategies employed in the so-called comparative correlative constructions, genetic and areal relationships being much more decisive. That is why these constructions will be discussed with emphasis on their diachronic development, and the possible influence of language contact.