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

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

WHY AM I NOT GETTING ALL OF THE ADS-L MESSAGES???

I think it is right that "still in the bed" is a different morphosyntactic 
phenomenon, it just happens that (in my experience) the three dialectally alien 
uses of "the" are all heard from the same people. In that sense it is like "in 
hospital" "in the hospital" "the measles" etc.

For some reason I do not always get all of the ADS-L messages, and it appears 
to me that Larry and Arnold have exchanged messages here that I did not get, 
so I don't know if they commented on the possible regional distribution of the 
two idioms with "the." A quick Google News search seems to suggest that a 
large number of "all of the sudden" ARE located in the South, but by no means all 
(but maybe the thing is spreading, or maybe Southerners are spread?). Also 
seem to be a lot of uses in connection with sports.

It is hard to search for "one at the time" because it tends to occur in 
expressions such as "he was eating one at the time he fell off the bus."

If there is a Southern connection, one would of course tend to expect to find 
the "the" idioms in African American Vernacular.


In a message dated 9/6/06 1:51:40 PM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes:


> 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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> 
> 

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