The indefiniteness of indefinite articles

[robinturner]

The trickiness of the English definite article is legendary. Bertrand Russell apparently wrote a whole book on the subject, and anyone who has tried to teach it to foreign students will appreciate this. But the indefinite article is almost as bad. For ages I just thought it was a non-specific veridical thingummybob, such that "a foo" meant "some member of the set of foos that I am not interested in specifying at this moment" (as opposed to "the foo", which means "one specific thing that I choose to attach the label 'foo' to and which is probably but not necessarily a member of the set of foos"). But then today, while thinking about the saying "Nature abhors a vacuum," I thought "Which vacuum?" Now this is obviously wrong; "a vacuum" here means "all vacuums", which is a very different use of the indefinite article from that in "I'd like a cup of tea," which certainly doesn't mean that I would like every cup of tea. I want at least one, and probably only one, cup of tea. This in turn contrasts with "I do like a nice cup of tea," which seems to be the indefinite equivalent of "The sleek Brazilian jaguar Does not in its arboreal gloom Distil so rank a feline smell As Grishkin in a drawing-room." Ho hum, I should go and brush up on my reading.

Comments

[cassielsander.livejournal.com]

Never thought about this before, but I think if called upon I would say it means "any vacuum" rather than "all vacuums". Which works slightly better for your cup of tea, albeit awkwardly.

[solri.livejournal.com]

You're right. In this case, Nature being what she is, "any"="all", but in other cases it doesn't: the sentence "John will sleep with any woman who'll have him" just implies John is an easy lay, while "John will sleep with all women who'll have him" sounds like a grandiose promise. In in this case, neither are equivalent to "John will sleep with a woman who'll have him."

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

"I do like a nice cup of tea,"

This is a "fronted structure" according to the materials I am supposed to be teaching from. It's similar for the "Nature abhors..." statement...

The indefinite is there for a level of stress, is how I try to explain it...

[solri.livejournal.com]

The "do" is there for stress, but I don't see how the indefinite article is, since "I do like the nice cup of tea" is odd (but possible) and "I do like nice cup of tea" is ungrammatical.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

Maybe because it's not just any [cup of ]tea, but a nice one?

[solri.livejournal.com]

In terms of strict semantics, that's true, but in discourse terms I don't think the "nice" really qualifies the kind of tea. It is obvious that the speaker would not like a nasty cup of tea; if the "nice" serves any purpose, my guess is that it is simply emphasising the fact that a cup of tea is a nice thing to have.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... that's all very true... I will consider thinking about it until I go to bed, then...

Articles, definite and indefinite

[duncangareth.livejournal.com]

Robin, you raise some interesting issues regarding indefinite articles.
Another nuance of the indefinite article is exemplied by a statement such as,
"I should like to be a fireman when I grow up." This does not refer to an actual fireman, does it?
Anyway, shed a tear for students of Zulu, in which it could be argued that there are around 17 articles which are both definite and indefinite at the same time.
Of course such comparisons are spurious since what I am calling "articles" are the noun prefixes which form part of the system of concordial prefixes that make up the language.

Re: Articles, definite and indefinite

[solri.livejournal.com]

Wow, and I thought those Chinese measure-words were a pain!