Mark Liberman has been investigating phrasal templates without content words. The latest example, courtesy of Bert Cappelle, is a pattern that Prof. Liberman refers to as The A-er the B, the C-er the D. As an example, he offers "The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat".
SC's command of Biblical and Talmudic Hebrew is quite shaky, but based on a variety of translations, the same pattern appears to show up in a rabbinic writing known as Pirkei Avot, or "Ethics of the Fathers". One translation puts chapter 2, section 8 as follows:
The more flesh the more worms; the more possessions the more anxiety; the more women the more witchcraft; the more maidservants the more lewdness, the more manservants the more theft. But the more Torah the more life, the more schooling the more wisdom; the more counsel the more understanding; the more righteousness the more peace.
As Prof. Liberman notes in his original post, a template like this seems to be a good argument for a construction-style account of sentence structure. SC guesses that Prof. Liberman's colleague Aravind Joshi would be happy to provide an alternate account in terms of tree-adjoining.
From the same post, since the research staff says SC owes him for this one:
By the way, I've been told that The Simpson's has now taken over the Shakespeare and the Bible as the largest single source of quotations and allusions in English-language text.
"The Shakespeare"? Now there's an argument for a template-based grammar.
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