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

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:30 AM -0400 9/7/06, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>Yes, the "weak" definites are more like "He is still in the bed"--suggesting
>that the person has only one arm or mirror, that there is only one dictionary,
>etc. (the "wall" example doesn't seem particularly "weak" to me).

They're related in that you're presenting any difference (among
dictionaries, walls in the room, mirrors) as being irrelevant.  As
has been pointed out, there's a contrast between "She's painting the
wall" (where the weak definite seems odd and hence there does seem to
be a presumption of uniqueness) and "She's scribbling on the wall"
(where the weak definite is possible, since it doesn't matter which
wall is affected).  Do you find the latter impossible, so you'd have
to say "She's scribbling on one of the walls" or "She's scribbling on
the north wall" or whatever?

>Still, the
>"suggestion" is overridden by the idiomatic nature of the utterance, and if
>one's idiom is not "the bed" or "the hospital" the semantic implications are
>apparent. One would never say, "Look it up in the index" in this
>same weak sense.

Agreed.  Or "Look it up in the book".

LH

>In a message dated 9/7/06 12:06:56 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
>
>>  >
>>  What did your Iowa grammar tell you about "He was punched in the arm"
>>  or "You should look it up in the dictionary" or "Go look in the
>>  mirror" or "Don't scribble on the wall"?  These have been discussed
>>  (sometimes under the rubric of "weak definites") and 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.
>>
>>  LH
>>
>>
>
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