Re: The.
| From: | Adrian Morgan <morg0072@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, May 22, 2001, 11:36 |
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Quoting John Cowan, quoting myself:
> > Consider this. If I said that my waist measurement in centimetres is
...
> It took me many minutes of pondering to get this; the trouble is not
> the "the", but the equivocation over "minus", which in this case does
> not have its technical meaning, but is a synonym for "without".
It's a contrived example, but I think it illustrates certain facts about
language. Here's how it works.
The word "minus" is indeed ambiguous, and the rule for resolving ambiguity is
to look for clues in the rest of the sentence. The phrase "1977 minus 19" has
the form of a standard mathematical statement, and recognising this resolves
the ambiguity. But in "1977 minus the 19", the definite article says, "you
know which one I'm talking about", which doesn't make sense for subtraction
because there isn't an /particular/ 'nineteen' for the article to refer to. So
the reader is lead to the other meaning of "minus", viz "without", because in
that case there /is/ a particular 'nineteen' that justifies the use of the
definite article.
Adrian.
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