Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Well, on that note: the construction “I went to the store” has always felt wrong to me as a native speaker. People say it even when that store lacks definiteness in context (ie the listener has no reason to know which one you mean). At the very least, it counts as a separate usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.

Edit: Here's a frustrating HN thread where someone tried to claim it makes sense, but it turned out his argument hinged on "well obviously all native English speakers regularly go to some store, right?" Screw the homebound.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620015

View on HN

Looking at: https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/english-language/definite...

I think the usage falls into this group: "The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",

When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to. Friends and neighbours would have also have known up to fairly recently, when people still mostly walked for groceries and such to the few small stores nearby and made friends with people who lived close.

So, I'd say it's a bit of a colloquial hold over from walking times and construction taking a listener into confidence.

>When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to.

But again, people use this even when I have no reason to know which store they went to.

I’m not necessarily saying they should stop doing this, but it’s clearly not the usual kind of definiteness implied but the use of “the”.

It is common for someone to say, for instance, "I need to go to the store" even if they don't have any particular store in mind.

A prescriptivist pedant might insist that this is incorrect, and they should instead say "I need to go to a store", but in my judgment as a native speaker, the version with "the" is more idiomatic, and the version with "a" sounds stilted.

Third time: I'm not imposing some kind of prescriptivism, and I know that it's common. You're not bringing in any new information here. I'm saying it deviates from the usual pattern of using "the" when the noun has definiteness.

To repeat another part of my initial post, it's like the use of "the" in "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". It's clearly a different usage/meaning/sense of "the" -- in fact, most other languages use a different word for that sense. (German uses je ... desto.) It would be very dubious to explain all uses of "the" as "oh its when the noun has definiteness". It wouldn't cover that case, and it wouldn't cover (the typical use of) "I went to the store".

I am agreeing with you that "the" in "I went to the store" does not necessarily imply any specific instance of the noun, and is a grammatically distinct use of the word.

Some of the statements (by other people) in this conversation are wrong, based on applying a school-style oversimplified explanation that doesn't really match English usage.

Usually, the mall, the store, the gas station in a story are habitual known places for the people telling you these stories, and they are implying that. In other cases, it is being used as an idiom that imply something habitual, common, run of the mill.

Again, they do it even when those prerequisites don’t hold. And your second sentence is agreeing that it’s a different usage than the normal definiteness.

I see this as consistent with other replies stating that The is something specific in a group, and A is an indeterminant one of many.

How can this be in your example? When I am saying "I went to the store", I am really saying "There are a group of locations that I could have gone. E.G., the car dealership, the bank, the museum, the store, or the office. I went to the store".

That's not how definiteness works otherwise -- it's always for a case where the other party would know which one you mean. This "selecting out of possible other choices" protocol is not a thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com