all of the sudden, one at the time, still in the bed

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 6, 2006, at 8:26 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> ... I think
> represent a rather different phenomenon from "one at the time" or
> "all of the sudden", which seem entirely foreign to me, partly
> because "one at a time" and "all of a sudden" appear to be idiomatic
> and entirely non-compositional in terms of the indefinite.  Those
> examples are closer to "He kicked a bucket", involving a dialectal or
> idiolectal reanalysis of the idiom rather than an extension of
> definites under certain semantic and pragmatic conditions.

my feeling exactly.

no quick finds on "kick a bucket" 'die', by the way -- but then there
are an awful lot of hits to sort through.

arnold

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