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

[Laurence Horn]

>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
>
Sorry for being cryptic.  What I meant was that "one at the time"
strikes me as being as foreign and sui generis (i.e. outside my
dialectal competence) as "kick a bucket [idiomatically]" would if I
came across it, which I'm not conscious of ever have doing--and no
doubt very much like the effect of my "stand on line" to many non-New
Yorkers.

L

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