Language Overflow

Damkerng T.

00:44

Which one is preferred?

> 1. Emphasis is placed on developing the skill of writing sentences and paragraphs.

> 2. Emphasis is placed on developing the skill of sentences and paragraphs writing.

tchrist

01:46

@DamkerngT. 1. 2 doesn't work.

Damkerng T.

@tchrist Thanks!

I wasn't sure because writing can be a noun, too.

tchrist

Well, "writing sentences" is a noun phrase.

But "writing" is there a verb, for it has an object.

> Quickly writing sentences is the best way to get your novel written.

> His early writing of sonnets prepared him for life on the stage.

The first uses it as a verb, the second a noun.

Damkerng T.

I guess we can modify writing only when it's a kind of writing. (I'm thinking about creative writing.) And sentence writing doesn't really work.

tchrist

Yup.

Damkerng T.

nods -- Thanks!

Færd

01:50

Does sentences and paragraphs modify writing in 2?

tchrist

@DamkerngT. Sure!

@Færd I don't think that 2 is grammatical today.

So I cannot say.

Damkerng T.

@Færd I tried to use it that way, but I doubted it.

(I mean its grammaticality.)

Færd

If so, there's another problem with 2 I guess. Can plural nouns modify other nouns?

Damkerng T.

@Færd That, too!

tchrist

@Færd Seldom but not never.

Færd

01:51

Okay then!

@tchrist Example?

Damkerng T.

My favorite example: enemies list :P

Færd

Ah!

Damkerng T.

02:56

Here is another non-gradable adjective: impossible. Is impossible gradable? I think most, if not all, grammar books would include it in their non-gradable adjectives. Which do you think is more common: It seems impossible or It seems to be impossible? Here is a relevant Google Ngram: books.google.com/ngrams/…. — Damkerng T. 39 secs ago

> As for non gradable adjectives such as asleep, alone, dead, etc. it's more common and idiomatic to use 'to be" after 'seem' such as 'He seems to be asleep'.
http://ell.stackexchange.com/a/79077/3281

Four users think this answer is correct.

It's an interesting observation, but if someone made it a grammar rule, I don't think it's a really good one.

CowperKettle

04:01

@snailboat Yay!

Anonymous

@CowperKettle One small step for . . . hey, wait a minute!

CowperKettle

@snailboat (0:

CowperKettle

04:17

Some complex article related question from a new user

0

Q: The definition of 'familiality' in the English Liguistics

My understanding of ‘familiarity’ according to the theories Christophersen, Karttunen, and Heim claimed is that it does not embrace those referents interpreted under ‘accomodation,’ ‘inferrability,’ or ‘bridging.’ Is my understanding correct? I went into the class and talked to the teacher. [the...

definite-article

a duplicate of

0

Q: Definition of 'Familiarity' in the English Linguistics

My understanding of ‘familiarity’ according to the theories Christophersen, Karttunen, and Heim claimed is that it does not embrace those referents interpreted under ‘accomodation,’ ‘inferrability,’ or ‘bridging.’ Is my understanding correct? I went into the class and talked to the teacher. [the...

meaning definite-article

Frankly, I understand nothing in the question.

I googled and found this

semarch.linguistics.fas.nyu.edu/Archive/jA2YTJmN/…

Irene Heim

Irene Roswitha Heim is a linguist and noted specialist in semantics. She was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA before finally moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, where she is Professor of Linguistics and a former Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. She is probably most famous for her 1982 University of Massachusetts Amherst dissertation The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. In the work she argued (developing an insight by the philosopher David Lewis) that indefinite noun phrases like a...

> In the work she argued (developing an insight by the philosopher David Lewis) that indefinite noun phrases like a cat in the sentence If a cat is not in Athens, she is in Rhodes are not quantifiers but free variables bound by an existential operator inserted in the sentence by a semantic operation that she dubbed existential closure.

Oh. My. God.

"Articles and Definiteness"

isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic980565.files/Sept%2021/…

A good comment, Snails.

The question belongs on Linguistics SE

Anonymous

Fun!

CowperKettle

Fun?

Anonymous

Reading about definiteness until your brain falls out.

CowperKettle

(0:

Anonymous

Y'know, Shoichi Iwasaki likes the term identifiability better than definiteness.

CowperKettle

04:34

nods

BBL!

Anonymous

Later! :-)

CowperKettle

05:24

> In your example:

"It's hot in here. Could you open the window?"
we can draw the conclusion from the use of the that the speaker and listener are working in a familiar place with windows they have seen before, and there is a particular single window known to the speaker and within reach of the listener.

Is that so?

1

Q: The definition of 'familiarity' in the English Liguistics

My understanding of ‘familiarity’ according to the theories of Christophersen, Karttunen, and Heim is that it does not embrace those referents interpreted under ‘accommodation,’ ‘inferrability,’ or ‘bridging.’ Is my understanding correct? I went into the class and talked to the teacher. [the tea...

definite-article

I thought that a person will say "Could you open the window" even if they mean "any window in the room".

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Nope.

CowperKettle

@snailboat So I thought.

Anonymous

Unfortunately, we're going to get answers from people who haven't read anything about the topic :-(

CowperKettle

I recalled an example from Quirk et al. about "He stopped at the side of the road".

"the side", despite there being two sides.

@snailboat We can always downvote. Ha. Haha. Muahaha!

Anonymous

Everyone who seriously studies definiteness agrees that there are situations, however uncommon, in which the number of entities that satisfy the requirements is not limited to one.

Anonymous

05:28

I did :-( I feel bad about it since he put a lot of work into it, but it's clear he hasn't done any research.

CowperKettle

nods

Anonymous

CGEL covers it too:

Anonymous

> Put your cup down on the arm of your chair.

Anonymous

(p.369)

Anonymous

> [To spouse, in a room with three equally salient windows] It's hot in here. Could you please open the window?

Anonymous

05:29

(Birner & Ward 1994)

Anonymous

The OP already knows this, so the answer is actually a step backwards.

CowperKettle

Maybe I should give a permalink to this chat discussion to Lawrence?

Anonymous

You could, but there's just a lot to cover and I haven't read all of the authors the OP is referring to, so I'm not qualified to talk about all of it.

CowperKettle

nods

I mean just the point about "the window"

Anonymous

Yeah, we could talk about that in here. I mean, we just did, but we could talk about it some more. :-)

Anonymous

05:43

The OP really needs to include a proper set of references in the question, I think.

CowperKettle

And this will help populate the chat.

nods

Anonymous

More examples from Birner and Ward:

Anonymous

> [Hotel concierge to guest, in a lobby with four elevators] You're in Room 611. Take the elevator to the sixth floor and turn left.

Anonymous

> [At a table containing four pitchers of milk, all equidistant from the hearer] Please pass the milk.

Anonymous

> Somebody left their shopping cart outside here where it could roll into a car. As a good citizen, I'll take it inside. I'll only be a minute; I'll just leave it up front near the cash register.

Anonymous

05:57

The milk one I have a little trouble imagining, personally.

Anonymous

Here's another example from CGEL with some explanation:

Anonymous

> He married the daughter of his bank manager.

Anonymous

First, the explanation for the example above with the arm of your chair:

Anonymous

> An (arm-)chair has two arms, but the definite article in [i] is in order on the assumption that it doesn't matter which one you choose. Again, then, the definite article signals my expectation that you don't need to ask Which arm of my chair?

Anonymous

And the explanation for the daughter of his bank manager:

V.V.

05:59

That's interesting.

Anonymous

> In [ii] it could be that the bank manager has in fact two daughters, but the is again appropriate on the assumption that you don't need to ask Which one?: perhaps the other is already married, or too young to marry, perhaps you don't know that there are two, and perhaps it simply doesn't matter, the important point being only that his bank manager was the father of the woman he married.

Anonymous

Now, in the common case, the referent will be uniquely identifiable in the discourse context. But that's not always the case.

Anonymous

Birner and Ward also point out non-unique uses like the following:

Anonymous

> As soon as my cousin arrived in Santiago, she broke her foot and had to spend a week in the hospital.

Anonymous

> Your 10:00 appointment – a Mr. Johanson – said he'd be late because he had to stop at the bank first.

Anonymous

06:03

> My history professor announced to the class today that he wasn't going to give us a final. He said that, while waiting in line at the grocery store, he realized that he already had enough information to assign us a grade.

Anonymous

None of these necessarily meet the criterion of being uniquely identifiable.

Anonymous

Birner and Ward explain:

Anonymous

> In each of the above cases, the definite NP - the hospital, the bank, and the grocery store, respectively - refers to some non-unique and not necessarily familiar entity, yet the use of the definite is felicitous. Notice, however, that these NPs are used to refer to locations that are not relevantly differentiable from other locations denoted by the same NP (cf. Givón 1978).

Anonymous

> That is, in (13a) the hospital in question is not relevantly differentiable from any other hospital for the purposes of the exchange; what is being conveyed is not that the speaker's cousin spent a week in a particular hospital, but rather that she was laid up for a week.

Anonymous

> For this reason, a sentence like My cousin had to go to the hospital today used in a context where the particular hospital in question is not uniquely identifiable will always convey that the cousin was in the hospital in some stereotypical capacity, i.e. as either a patient or a visitor; it would be infelicitous, for example, if the cousin were there as an architect designing a new wing (cf. Stvan 1993).

Anonymous

06:06

I recommend reading the whole paper: ling.northwestern.edu/~ward/BLS94.pdf

Anonymous

06:17

@V.V. Definiteness is a really interesting topic! But unfortunately it's difficult to describe exactly.

Anonymous

So people have written a lot about it, particularly about definiteness in English and the definite article.

V.V.

Reminds of generalization, I don't know why.

Perhaps, because of *typical *

Anonymous

There's generic definiteness:

Anonymous

> Babbage invented the computer.

Anonymous

Here, the computer refers to the entire class of things called computers.

Anonymous

06:21

But:

Anonymous

> Babbage repaired the computer.

Anonymous

Now we must be talking about Babbage repairing a particular computer.

Anonymous

It's no longer generic.

V.V.

Thanks for the article. I thought about ** the bank**, the grocery

Anonymous

Ah, I see.

V.V.

06:23

Don't you have the feeling?

Anonymous

What feeling in particular?

Anonymous

The bank and the grocery in those examples are very interesting.

Anonymous

If you keep reading after the section I quoted, Birner and Ward discuss what happens if you try to add a modifier, like if you say the big hospital.

V.V.

Of some general meaning

Anonymous

The big hospital can't have that kind of general meaning, it has to be more specific.

V.V.

06:25

I shuld read the article first

Should.

Anonymous

By the way, Birner and Ward have a number of very good publications, including Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English (1998).

Anonymous

That one's not available online, though.

Anonymous

They also co-authored the Information Packaging chapter of CGEL with Rodney Huddleston.

CowperKettle

@snailboat Maybe it's a generic noun phrase.

Ah, yes, it is.

Anonymous

You should also be able to read On (in)definite articles (Hawkins 1991) online for free: jstor.org/stable/4176125

Anonymous

06:30

@CowperKettle Yep! A definite generic.

Anonymous

There are bare plural generics, indefinite singular generics, and definite singular generics.

Anonymous

So this one fits in the third category.

Anonymous

There are a bunch of specific uses of articles that are hard to explain from any sort of general principle.

Anonymous

We can go a little further than that, even, and say the same is true of definiteness in general.

Anonymous

There are even false definites that appear to be marked as definite syntactically, but don't seem to meet the semantic/pragmatic definition of definiteness.

Anonymous

06:33

(See CGEL p.1401)

CowperKettle

nods

Anonymous

What's really interesting is that, when you try to explain everything with a general principle . . .

Anonymous

If you compare it with another language, say, Japanese, where a similar principle of identifiability applies,

Anonymous

All the details are different!

Anonymous

It really drives home the point mentally that the general principle is useful but limited . . .

CowperKettle

06:40

nods

Anonymous

@CowperKettle How much do you think you picked up the use of articles naturally, and how much from reading about them in books?

CowperKettle

@snailboat I don't know, frankly. I had to read some basic explanation to start using them.

As a child, I had a book in English. I wanted to start reading it. I had no prior English training. I just picked a dictionary, then opened the first page. The first word on the first page was "the".

I scrolled to "the" in the dictionary.

There was a whole big page describing it, but I understood nothing.

So I closed the book and put it on the shelf.

English was definitely not for me.

Anonymous

Aww.

Anonymous

It's difficult to learn how to use function words from a dictionary.

CowperKettle

It had such weird words like "the", the meaning of which is incomprehensible. (0:

Anonymous

06:48

The doesn't have any meaning of its own per se.

CowperKettle

I was just 6 or 7 years old then.

If someone had told me then that I should just skip "the" and "a", it might've went better.

Anonymous

That's a great age to start learning a language! :-) Depending on how you go about it . . .

CowperKettle

Yes. My father made me learn to count up to 20 in English, and some basic words. But he never studied English, so it stopped at that until the 4th grade, when we had an English teacher at school.

Anonymous

After the age of about 15, there's no longer any correlation between age and ease of language learning.

CowperKettle

nods

Anonymous

06:53

From 3 to 15 or so, there's a gradient from easy to hard.

CowperKettle

Synaptic pruning

Synaptic pruning or axon pruning is the process of synapse elimination that occurs between early childhood and the onset of puberty in many mammals, including humans. Pruning starts near the time of birth and is completed by the time of sexual maturation in humans. At birth, the human brain consists of approximately 86 (± 8) billion neurons. The infant brain will increase in size by a factor of up to 5 by adulthood. Two factors contribute to this growth: the growth of synaptic connections between neurons, and the myelination of nerve fibers; the total number of neurons, however, remains the same...

Waves of pruning, and a decline in neurogenesis.

Anonymous

Well, there are a lot of factors that apply, but I really believe in Cutler's theory.

CowperKettle

?

Anonymous

That there isn't any true "critical period", but that we become more and more efficient at our native languages over time, which means we become quite practiced at ignoring input that isn't relevant to hearing those native languages (for example, non-phonemic distinctions).

Anonymous

We retain neuroplasticity into adulthood and the ability to acquire these distinctions, though.

Anonymous

06:55

In fact, we keep refining our phonetic processing our entire lives.

Anonymous

There's no one single factor that makes learning an L2 language difficult, though.

Anonymous

Another factor is L1–L2 interaction in lexical activation.

Anonymous

When you hear L2 words, your existing L1 network is also activated and competes.

CowperKettle

nods

Anonymous

Ooh, I can link to this page on Google Books: books.google.com/books?id=sggDPSzE0-gC&pg=304

Anonymous

06:58

I love Native Listening. There's no other book quite like it right now.

CowperKettle

nods

@CowperKettle I don't think the point is misleading and I don't think this post deserves a downvote. It is one of a few possible scenarios. — Rathony 2 mins ago

Anonymous

@CowperKettle There's a lot of evidence that our language systems aren't actually frozen in time after childhood. Chapter 11 of Native Listening is titled 'The Plasticity of Adult Speech Perception'.

CowperKettle

nods

Anonymous

It's really interesting. Native speakers pronounce things differently as they age. As language changes, the living speakers change with them.

Anonymous

Mergers and splits happen generationally, though.

Anonymous

07:02

We're also constantly adapting to new speakers mentally, whether we realize it or not.

Anonymous

That's why someone can be hard to understand the first time you meet them, but then it 'clicks' and starting the next day you understand them fine :-)

Anonymous

I don't know if you've ever had an experience like that or not.

CowperKettle

Maybe with songs.

Anonymous

For me it was when I first started working with people with Australian accents, British accents, Indian accents, and so on.

Anonymous

I'd have trouble at first, and then it would be fine :-)

CowperKettle

07:05

(0:

"In Russian, this tatoo means "never give up""

(In reality, it's "meat balls in tomato sauce")

Anonymous

Haha!

CowperKettle

A parody on the popular trend to make tatoos using Chinese or Japanese characters.

BBL!

Anonymous

Talk to you later, Kettles!

Anonymous

09:59

Word of the day: shirtfronting

2

Anonymous

0

Q: Japanese for shirtfronting

How is the English verb shirtfront, which has a sporting meaning of deliberately colliding into an opponent's chest, knocking them into the ground, and a vague political meaning of confronting another person associated with then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott claiming he would confront Vla...

translation

Færd

12:24

@Araucaria Very interesting input about the use of seem to be for secondhand knowledge. I have that feeling about it too (although, being a non-native speaker, it doesn't count as an important feeling), maybe because the use of two copulas in "A seems to be B" indicates that the statement "A is B" had existed before the new one was made. I mean, maybe it's the copula in the pre-existing statement "A is B" that transfers and changes into be in "A seems to be B", and that's what makes it sound like secondhand information. — Færd 6 mins ago

Damkerng T.

Ahh... that seem to be X vs. seem X again.

I think there's something similar in my first language, and I don't think anybody really gives it some thought when we use which alternative.

Færd

Has this idea of seem to be being secondhand info come up here?

Anonymous

I don't recall discussing it before.

Damkerng T.

I think Araucaria mentioned that first, but only in the comments on the main site.

Færd

I tried to provide an explanation for that. That's my impression; may well be wrong.

Damkerng T.

12:28

For me, to be seems to add another layer of "seeming".

Færd

to be, you mean?

Anonymous

I wish I could extend my bounty!

Damkerng T.

Yes. Sorry about the typo!

Færd

@snailboat Apparently you're not happy with the answers (and comments?) so far.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat IIRC, we can add a bounty over a bounty, but we have to double the points? Not sure.

Anonymous

12:30

Yeah, I can add a second bounty if I want.

Anonymous

@Færd Well, I have a couple answers I can see myself awarding the bounty to, but maybe there's more to say about it :-)

Færd

Mhm. I hope you do add what you think about it (your own answer or personal impression), regardless of who gets the bounty.

Damkerng T.

♫ Comments, comments, comments. ♫ ( ＾◡＾)

I wonder if anyone has written anything about Thai's [ A ดูเหมือน B ] vs. [ A ดูเหมือนว่า B ].

Maybe it's not as important as other subjects in Thai.

Anonymous

Sometimes the complementizer という (to yū) is inserted before the head noun in Japanese clausal noun modification. It's been characterized as indicating non-factivity.

Anonymous

It's grammaticalized from a reported speech construction "(someone) says that".

Anonymous

12:43

The discussion reminded me of that.

Damkerng T.

nods -- It's interesting how different languages work!

I'm not even sure what part of speech ว่า is supposed to be assigned to.

Maybe it's like English like in this respect. (Like covers all PoS's, iirc.)

Anonymous

Well, assigning something to a part of speech can be surprisingly difficult sometimes.

Anonymous

Like, I just called という a 'complementizer'. Morphologically, it looks like it consists of a postposition followed by a verb in citation form.

Anonymous

But does it have a full range of inflectional forms? Does it take the same complementation as the verb it's derived from?

Anonymous

Does it, in fact, predicate at all? It doesn't take a subject, and it doesn't have its literal meaning of 'say' anymore.

Anonymous

12:50

It isn't really much like a verb, but at first glance you would think it is one . . .

Damkerng T.

The basic meaning of ว่า is "say", too, but it doesn't mean "say" anymore in ดูเหมือนว่า.

Anonymous

Interesting! :-)

Anonymous

13:20

@DamkerngT. By the way, the complementizer という is generally written in kana since it doesn't carry the meaning the verb 言う usually does.

Anonymous

With kanji, it would be と言う.

Anonymous

But if you write that, you're telling people you're using it as a full verb meaning 'say'.

CowperKettle

13:31

JR's comment to this morning's article question:

@CowperK - Let's say you and I are working in a hot room with three windows along one wall. You are between me and the middle window. I might easily say, "Could you open the window?" and you might reply "Sure," and proceed to open any one of the three. (I might be surprised if you stepped to your left and opened a different one, and I may or may not be bothered that the one you opened isn't the one I expected you to open, but the lines between specificity and inference can be blurry.) That's an interesting chat between you and Snail, but I don't see how it invalidates this answer. — J.R. ♦ 4 hours ago

Damkerng T.

13:45

@snailboat Oh, I see!

It's like a hint, but it's more than just a hint!

Anonymous

Well, you can always write anything in kana. Using kanji is optional.

Anonymous

So using kanji is a stronger sign than not using kanji.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

But if you consistently use the kanji for 言う whenever possible, then your reader can tell :-)

Anonymous

And many people do.

Damkerng T.

13:48

What if I write everything else the paraghraph in kanji (when it's possible) and leave this という in kana.

Will it be like I'm telling the reader that, no, I don't want this to mean "say"?

Anonymous

Yeah, that would probably give a similar impression.

Anonymous

Though of course the reader can tell from context whether it's という or と言う. They usually don't need the kana–kanji distinction to tell the difference.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

So if you write という but it's used like と言う, they'll probably understand it as と言う :-)

Damkerng T.

Maybe the reader will think I made a typo. :P

Anonymous

13:50

And if you write と言う but it's used like という, they might just think you wrote it the wrong way.

Damkerng T.

Hehe!

Anonymous

But there's nothing wrong with writing という when と言う is expected.

Anonymous

Just the other way around :-)

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

14:26

@CowperKettle Well, the OP wrote:

Anonymous

> My understanding of ‘familiarity’ according to the theories of Christophersen, Karttunen, and Heim is that it does not embrace those referents interpreted under ‘accommodation,’ ‘inferrability,’ or ‘bridging.’ Is my understanding correct?

Anonymous

The answer ignores this question entirely.

Anonymous

> This referent is not regarded as ‘familiar’ to the hearer at the time of utterance even though he/she can accommodate it?

Anonymous

The answer ignores this question entirely.

Anonymous

> Are the weak definite nouns 'familiar' (In a room with three equally salient windows. "It's hot in here. Could you open the window?") ?

Anonymous

14:27

The answer explains the basic case, when the question is clearly asking about exceptional cases.

Anonymous

The answer simply doesn't address the question.

Anonymous

It looks like J.R. thinks that you think you found a "gotcha" exceptional case where the answer doesn't work. (Well, it's not clear if J.R. agrees with the exception, but that's not relevant since it's well established.) And it seems that J.R. doesn't think that finding a "gotcha" like this should invalidate the entire answer.

CowperKettle

Yes, Snails, but JR addressed my point about "the window"

Anonymous

But that's not the problem here.

Anonymous

Yes, but his response misses the point.

CowperKettle

14:30

Ah. I see.

BBL!

Anonymous

Later!

Anonymous

So I'm afraid I do still have to stand by my downvote.

Anonymous

I don't think a simplified discussion of definiteness is necessarily a bad thing. The answer he posted could be a useful answer to a different question.

Anonymous

I think the OP will have to post it elsewhere to get a useful answer, and will probably have to put more effort into the question.

Damkerng T.

17:02

0

Q: Graduation/Infection Rate Among/In

I have a question about the usage of the prepositions "among" and "in". I have two contexts here. The first context concerns virus infection. 1a. The infection rate among elderly patients remains high. 1b. The infection rate in elderly patients remains high. The second context concer...

meaning grammar prepositions usage

> 2a. The graduation rate among recent immigrants remains low.
2b. The graduation rate in recent immigrants remains low.

> Google searches suggest that, for the first context, both sentences 1a and 1b using prepositions "among" and "in" are standard English. But for the second context, Google searches suggest only sentence 2a using "among" is standard English. What do native speakers think?

I don't know what search string the OP used, but I like neither 2a nor 2b. The first preposition came to my mind was of.

I'm not a native speaker anyway.

Hi! @skillpatrol

skill patrol

Hello! @DamkerngT.

Damkerng T.

Sometimes your skull drops by, sometimes the skill one, sometimes both, at the same time. :-)

skill patrol

17:17

Yup, it depends what device I'm on. Skill=iPad while skull=iPhone :-)

Sometimes I use both simultaneously.

Damkerng T.

Oh, I see!

Damkerng T.

18:24

Evening! @V.V.

V.V.

Good evening, Damkerng!

Damkerng T.

(I just found that I can't make iPad voice input to transcribe my สัมพัทธ์ correctly, no matter what! It always gave me สัมผัส. Perhaps it can't recognize tones in tonal languages very well.)

Looks like there are only us in the room right now!

V.V.

That's strange.

Though it's Saturday.

Damkerng T.

18:42

2

Q: And Then There Were None

And Then There Were None This is the title of A. Christie's mystery novel. Why is there the verb "were" used instead of "was"? Are in this case these two verbs interchangeable?

singular-vs-plural

Another question that could become controversial.

@CowperKettle cc @snailboat "My understanding of ‘familiarity’ according to the theories of Christophersen, Karttunen, and Heim is that it does not embrace those referents interpreted under ‘accommodation,’ ‘inferrability,’ or ‘bridging.’ Is my understanding correct?" -- Posing the question this way makes it unanswerable for anyone who hasn't studied those theories (by Christophersen, Karttunen, and Heim), IMHO.

^Maybe I should put a blank line between the two questions.

One Google search and one page in a book make me think that in their theory(-ies?) "familiarity" means identifiability.

Damkerng T.

19:11

> we can draw the conclusion from the use of the that the speaker and listener are working in a familiar place with windows they have seen before, and there is a particular single window known to the speaker and within reach of the listener. The speaker is expecting the listener to know which window.

> ell.stackexchange.com/a/88167/3281

This is almost like if a friend comes to my place and I ask him or her to "It's hot in here. Could you open the window?" and he or she hasn't come to my place before, or my room has more than on window, I'm making a grammar mistake.

Damkerng T.

20:05

The Articles: A Study of Their Theory and Use in English‌, Paul Christophersen. (1939)

Why wasn't it published 20 years before that?!

Damkerng T.

20:19

> Consider the following sentence from Carlson and Sussman (2005):

> (1) Mary heard about the riot on the radio, and Bill did too.

> Intuition suggests that Mary and Bill must have heard about the same riot, but not necessarily by means of the same radio (or even the same radio station).

> Weak definite noun phrases: rich, but not strong, special, but not unique‌, Natalie M. Klein, et al.

Damkerng T.

> In Christophersen’s view, what distinguishes definite from indefinite descriptions is whether or not the addressee of the utterance is presumed to be acquainted with the referent of the NP. In an often cited passage, Christophersen remarks: “Now the speaker must always be supposed to know which individual he is thinking of; the interesting thing is that the the-form supposes that the hearer knows it too” (Christophersen 1939, 28).

> Definite and indefinite, Barbara Abbott.

> (9) Sue is mad because the realtor who sold her house overcharged his fee.

> Adherents to the familiarity theory often invoke the idea of accommodation (following Lewis 1979) to explain these uses. The idea is that addressees are willing to accept a definite description if they are able to figure out the intended referent.

> (Ibid)

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