Slovak Comparative Correlatives: New Insights

Comparative Correlatives (CCs) are structures that have attracted substantial interest. In Slovak, they typically look like the following proverb:

Čím bližšie Rím, tým horší kresťan.

‘The closer (to) Rome, the worse the Christian.’

So far, no extensive research has been conducted on CCs in Slavic languages except Polish [1]. In Slovak, CCs have not received a great deal of attention. Accordingly, this study examines the various forms of CCs in a Slovak National Corpus (SNC) random sample of 500 tokens, showing that there is much more variety than has been acknowledged in the literature. Frequencies will be used to show that there are iconic structures, and it will be argued that there are construction-specific properties that suggest the existence of a specific CC construction in Slovak.