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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

The "every hiker climbed a hill" question is silly. The sentence is ambiguous between a surface scope reading and a reading with a specific indefinite. The first reading is compatible with every hiker climbing the same hill, and the second reading is true only if this is the case. So even if one of these readings is obviously more accessible than the other (which is not clear to me) there is still no obvious sense in which either picture is the "right" answer.

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I think the idea is that, if you know English well, you will immediately contrast it with "every hiker climbed the hill", and realize there was a very likely reason the speaker didn't say that instead: there was probably more than one hill, and/or that the speaker could not be confident that there was only one.

I guess, but I'm a native English speaker and I don't find myself particularly tempted to make that inference in the absence of any kind of context. There are surely far better tests for "a" vs "the" than examples like that.

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.

> 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...

>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.

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.

> 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=%2...

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.)

Articles 'a/an' and 'the' are simply the hardest thing to learn for me (polish native). I've spent so much time trying to figure them out. There are no rules honestly, almost every text in english has a counter-example to what english textbooks say about whether to use definite or indefinite one.

Maybe that's because we don't have such a distinction in polish or maybe there is something I am missing. Interesting thing though is that I don't seem to ever misinterpret the meaning of the text I'm reading and I'm not sure if I'd even notice if articles were missing or not

My slavic friends also have the same problem. I think it's a particulary acute problem for learners of a language with articles coming from a language without. It was much easier for me, for example, to learn Russian, as a native english speaker. I agree with you that we could probably do without articles, but it's not as if polish and russian don't have any need for them. In Russian этот/эта/это etc. are often use as a semi "the".

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