> Now, the President wasn't part of your conversational context, in fact there was no conversational context, nor any context with the speaker. That's an aweso

> Now, the President wasn't part of your conversational context, in fact there was no conversational context, nor any context with the speaker. That's an awesome example! My proposed patch would be: singular instantiated concrete nouns in English always need a determiner, and we should use the most specific determiner that pragmatics will give a plausible meaning to. (So also "our mother lives in Boston" is preferable to ?"the mother lives in Boston" but the second option is possible in some contexts.) > More generally, any attempt to give simple rules for this part of English grammar will fail, and will not generalize to other languages with articles. Yeah, that's a great point. For example, Portuguese commonly requires articles with abstract nouns, where English would forbid them. "O amor é um dos maiores prazeres da vida." '(the) love is one of the greatest pleasures of (the) life' Someone learning one language from the other might first think "oh, great, this language has definite and indefinite articles, just like my native language -- it's no problem, I already understand this". But that understanding will fall down when confronted with situations like abstract nouns. Ancient Greek has definite articles but no indefinite articles, and I was taught that definite articles are mandatory with people's proper names (ὁ Πλάτων, '(the) Plato'). But it's apparently more complicated than that, because for example in https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0257%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D1 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... sometimes he's called ὁ Πλάτων and sometimes Πλάτων (for reasons that I don't grasp). And similarly in Portuguese, it's common to refer to people in the third person by a proper name plus definite article (o João, a Maria) but neither obligatory nor universal. My intuition is that it's a very mild honorific and that it's only done when we think the listener is already familiar with the person referred to, but I'm not a native speaker and I bet that intuition isn't quite right either. So yeah! These rules feel super-simple, and they're really not.