To express that a degree of one event is conditioned by (or paralleled by) a degree of another, the "the...the..." construction with a comparative after each "the" is used. Examples include sentences such as: (1) the more dangerous mountains are to climb, the more challenging they are; (2) the more often a man has been in prison, the more likely he is to return there; (3) the harder plastic models are to build, the more challenging they are. The comparative clause construction in English is notorious for its syntactic complexity. What is called in this paper "the shorter, the better" construction exhibits ambiguities and puzzles of great interest to the theory of grammar in general and comparative constructions in particular. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the syntactic structure of comparatives of proportion within the framework of transformational grammar. (Author/CLK)