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> I'm a native English speaker and I don't find myself particularly tempted to make that inference Perhaps your mathematical/technical background is overriding

> I'm a native English speaker and I don't find myself particularly tempted to make that inference Perhaps your mathematical/technical background is overriding? :-) > It's also not in general a correct use of "the" to say something like "We all climbed the hill" in an area where there's more than one hill, even if you all climbed the same hill. Seems entirely context dependent... and this example doesn't say "we". I don't know about you, but if I was talking about a bunch of hikers (myself not included) and they all climbed the same hill, I would not say they climbed "a" hill. Yes, I might not get charged with perjury on a legal thing, but it'd still be quite misleading...

foldr 8y ago
>Seems entirely context dependent... Yes, indeed, and there is no context in the question. >but if I was talking about a bunch of hikers (myself not included) and they all climbed the same hill, I would not say they climbed "a" hill. I don't think this is right in the multi-hill scenario: The hikers went to Yosemite. Every hiker climbed the hill. That sounds pretty weird.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  It sounds weird (well, I'd say it's just wrong) because you didn't already mention a single hill to refer back to, not because "a" conveys the meaning better. In that case if you wanted to get across that it was the same hill, you'd say "the same hill". You still wouldn't say "a" if you meant there was only one hill.
  - foldr 8y ago
    > You still wouldn't say "a" if you meant there was only one hill. You wouldn’t say “a” if you wanted to explicitly convey that every hiker climbed the same hill. But you can perfectly well say “Every hiker climbed a hill” if you know that every hiker climbed the same hill. To deny this basically amounts to denying the existence of specific indefinites: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22specific+indefinites%22&btnG= https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%2...
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      Sigh. You're barking up the wrong tree. OK, I'll append a third reason: maybe the speaker was confident. Yes, I guess technically just because he knows some piece of information, that doesn't mean he has to convey that information to you. Maybe because, for whatever reason, there being a single hill was not a conclusion he intended you to draw from the statement. Which means you shouldn't be drawing that conclusion. Are we good now? I think I'll rest my case here; if you think your conclusion is just as correct as the alternative then please do go around responding with that assumption as you hear people speak; I wish you (and the people you're speaking to) the best of luck.
      - foldr 8y ago
        Your sarcasm kind of proves the point: I don’t actually have any difficulty in my day-to-day life with misusing or misunderstanding definite or indefinite articles. So I don’t think I’m likely to be alone in finding the quiz question obscure. There are all kind of things that you might infer from a speaker choosing to use the indefinite rather than the definite in a particular circumstance. But I don’t think that non-uniqueness inferences are all that strongly indicated in the absence of any knowledge of the speaker’s intentions. Here are a couple of other examples: Every student in the class sat an exam. Every child in the school has joined a club. These sentences simply don't carry any strong implication that it wasn't the same exam/club for each student/child. The specific indefinite reading is readily available.
- gowld 8y ago
  A ntive English speaker would say "The hikers went to Yosemite. Everyone climbed some hill." where "some" has a commo English meaning, not the common math-English meaning of existential quantification.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >Everyone climbed some hill. // That sounds awful to my en-gb ears. "They climbed some hill" sounds like a weird way to say "a little of a hill, but not the whole thing". "They all climbed hills" or "Everyone climbed one of the hills" if people didn't climb more than one hill each.
  - foldr 8y ago
    You could say that, but you don't have to phrase it that way. A regular indefinite article is fine too. (The technical term for what you're talking about is a "specific indefinite", by the way.)

foldr 8y ago

>Seems entirely context dependent... Yes, indeed, and there is no context in the question. >but if I was talking about a bunch of hikers (myself not included) and they all climbed the same hill, I would not say they climbed "a" hill. I don't think this is right in the multi-hill scenario: The hikers went to Yosemite. Every hiker climbed the hill. That sounds pretty weird.

mehrdadn 8y ago
It sounds weird (well, I'd say it's just wrong) because you didn't already mention a single hill to refer back to, not because "a" conveys the meaning better. In that case if you wanted to get across that it was the same hill, you'd say "the same hill". You still wouldn't say "a" if you meant there was only one hill.
- foldr 8y ago
  > You still wouldn't say "a" if you meant there was only one hill. You wouldn’t say “a” if you wanted to explicitly convey that every hiker climbed the same hill. But you can perfectly well say “Every hiker climbed a hill” if you know that every hiker climbed the same hill. To deny this basically amounts to denying the existence of specific indefinites: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22specific+indefinites%22&btnG= https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%2...
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    Sigh. You're barking up the wrong tree. OK, I'll append a third reason: maybe the speaker was confident. Yes, I guess technically just because he knows some piece of information, that doesn't mean he has to convey that information to you. Maybe because, for whatever reason, there being a single hill was not a conclusion he intended you to draw from the statement. Which means you shouldn't be drawing that conclusion. Are we good now? I think I'll rest my case here; if you think your conclusion is just as correct as the alternative then please do go around responding with that assumption as you hear people speak; I wish you (and the people you're speaking to) the best of luck.
    - foldr 8y ago
      Your sarcasm kind of proves the point: I don’t actually have any difficulty in my day-to-day life with misusing or misunderstanding definite or indefinite articles. So I don’t think I’m likely to be alone in finding the quiz question obscure. There are all kind of things that you might infer from a speaker choosing to use the indefinite rather than the definite in a particular circumstance. But I don’t think that non-uniqueness inferences are all that strongly indicated in the absence of any knowledge of the speaker’s intentions. Here are a couple of other examples: Every student in the class sat an exam. Every child in the school has joined a club. These sentences simply don't carry any strong implication that it wasn't the same exam/club for each student/child. The specific indefinite reading is readily available.
gowld 8y ago
A ntive English speaker would say "The hikers went to Yosemite. Everyone climbed some hill." where "some" has a commo English meaning, not the common math-English meaning of existential quantification.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >Everyone climbed some hill. // That sounds awful to my en-gb ears. "They climbed some hill" sounds like a weird way to say "a little of a hill, but not the whole thing". "They all climbed hills" or "Everyone climbed one of the hills" if people didn't climb more than one hill each.
- foldr 8y ago
  You could say that, but you don't have to phrase it that way. A regular indefinite article is fine too. (The technical term for what you're talking about is a "specific indefinite", by the way.)