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> There are lots of words with essentially no semantic content; they belong to various parts of speech just the same I said "the" is solely a cohesive device,

by vorg 11y ago

> There are lots of words with essentially no semantic content; they belong to various parts of speech just the same I said "the" is solely a cohesive device, independent of the semantics and in the domain of thematics, so "a" and "the" are used orthogonally. I also said if "part of speech" is defined as being in the grammatical structure of languages, then "the" doesn't have a part of speech -- I was reinforcing the first point I made. All your arguments have only made some point which is tangential to what you've replied to. Linguists don't use the term "part of speech" anymore anyway, they instead define "word class". As for "the premarital sex" and "the Hindoo", you're creating an implied prior context when you use "the" instead of a regular form such as "all premarital sex" and "Hindoos". The "the" overlays onto the "all", "-s", or "a" to change the grammatical structure.

thaumasiotes 11y ago
But "a" and "the" aren't used orthogonally -- they interfere with each other. They participate in the grammatical structure of English in exactly the same way. If you want a more focused reply, I need you to explain what you're talking about at greater length. As to "your house is big": you said > Looks like "your house is big" doesn't contract because the voiced "is" becomes unvoiced "-s" when contracting This isn't true. Just look at the followup I gave, "your dog's big". By analogy to the verb suffixes -s and -ed (and the clitic genitive particle 's), we can see that voiced "is" /ɪz/ would contract to [əz] (still a full syllable), not [s], when following "house". As it's pronounced that way anyway, investigation is pretty futile.
- vorg 11y ago
  > But "a" and "the" aren't used orthogonally -- they interfere with each other. The semantic "a" and thematic "the" don't interfere with each other, and can be taught separately. Perhaps you're thinking of their influence on the end grammar of the sentence. > They participate in the grammatical structure of English in exactly the same way. Not exactly the same. As I said above, the "the" overlays onto the grammatical structure after the "a" does. > If you want a more focused reply, I need you to explain what you're talking about at greater length. What makes you think I want your replies? I never replied to you initially.

by vorg 11y ago

thaumasiotes 11y ago

But "a" and "the" aren't used orthogonally -- they interfere with each other. They participate in the grammatical structure of English in exactly the same way. If you want a more focused reply, I need you to explain what you're talking about at greater length. As to "your house is big": you said > Looks like "your house is big" doesn't contract because the voiced "is" becomes unvoiced "-s" when contracting This isn't true. Just look at the followup I gave, "your dog's big". By analogy to the verb suffixes -s and -ed (and the clitic genitive particle 's), we can see that voiced "is" /ɪz/ would contract to [əz] (still a full syllable), not [s], when following "house". As it's pronounced that way anyway, investigation is pretty futile.

vorg 11y ago
> But "a" and "the" aren't used orthogonally -- they interfere with each other. The semantic "a" and thematic "the" don't interfere with each other, and can be taught separately. Perhaps you're thinking of their influence on the end grammar of the sentence. > They participate in the grammatical structure of English in exactly the same way. Not exactly the same. As I said above, the "the" overlays onto the grammatical structure after the "a" does. > If you want a more focused reply, I need you to explain what you're talking about at greater length. What makes you think I want your replies? I never replied to you initially.