Re: When do you start to stop learning?

From: Shez (UseReplyAddress_at_nospam.invalid.uk)
Date: 08/17/04 

Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 01:06:51 +0100

In the faraway land of sci.lang.japan, Cindy <cindyduels@att.net> said:
>One interesting thing is that nobody has really taught me the articles
>(an, a, the) effectively. I have asked many native English speakers to
>teach me, you know.

I'll give you a lesson then!

"An" is used simply because it's easier to stick an "n" between two
vowels: "an orange" is easier to say than "a orange".

Using "the" or "a" with a word: Ask yourself, if I was going to make
this word the subject of the sentence, would I use "wa" or "ga"? If it
would be ga, say "the", otherwise say "a". (This is known as Shez's
ga/the equivalence hypothesis.) If you use "the", it means you think the
person you are talking to already knows which individual object you are
talking about.

So for instance, "I am eating the orange" -- it must be a specific
orange we have already been talking about, so it already has its own
identity, e.g. the orange you just gave me, or the orange we said was
the biggest, etc.

"I am eating an orange" -- although it's obviously a specific orange, we
hadn't previously talked about it, so although I know which orange I'm
eating, you probably don't. It could be any orange, it doesn't really
matter which one it is.

Here's a hybrid case: "I am eating this orange" -- here I am drawing
your attention to a specific orange. I can't say "the" because we didn't
previously establish the identity of the orange. I don't want to say
"a", because that would suggest its identity was unimportant. So I use
"this", which signals I am talking about a specific thing without
expecting you to already know its identity. (In fact, when I say "this"
I am actually establishing its identity. In subsequent sentences we
would therefore talk about "the orange". Previously it would have just
been "an orange".) There is an orange-coloured book called "Naming and
Necessity" by Saul Kripke which discusses the philosophy of this.)

So "the" emphasises the identity of the individual object, whereas "a"
doesn't. This means you should use "a" for general statements.
"I am so hungry I could eat a horse" is very different to
"I am so hungry I could eat the horse". The first is a metaphor, the
second says not just that you have a particular horse in mind, but that
you believe the listener already knows which horse you are talking
about.

-Shez. 

-- 
______________________________________________________
"There's not much better than being young and alive,
 and nothing worse than being old and dead"
-- Tom Baker (Mycroft) in Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased).
______________________________________________________
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