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Some of my favorite books are from the Cambridge Texts in Linguistics series. They're monographs with titles like Tense, or Aspect: thorough explorations of the syntax and semantics of some linguistic category in a variety of languages.
My current bus book is one of those, titled Definiteness. That's as in "definite article". It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this is a 340-page book on the meaning and uses of the word "the".
Well, to be fair, it also talks about "le", and "der", and "al-". "This" and "that" get some attention. More broadly, there are a variety of things English does with its definite article; other languages - those which have definite articles - do somewhat different things, and some of them use different tools to do some of the things "the" does. It all adds up....
(Look, I once read, and greatly enjoyed, Henry Petroski's book The Pencil and Witold Rybczynski's One Good Turn, on the history of the screwdriver. I'm perfectly willing to read someone carefully discussing some little thing, if they've got interesting things to say.)
My current bus book is one of those, titled Definiteness. That's as in "definite article". It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this is a 340-page book on the meaning and uses of the word "the".
Well, to be fair, it also talks about "le", and "der", and "al-". "This" and "that" get some attention. More broadly, there are a variety of things English does with its definite article; other languages - those which have definite articles - do somewhat different things, and some of them use different tools to do some of the things "the" does. It all adds up....
(Look, I once read, and greatly enjoyed, Henry Petroski's book The Pencil and Witold Rybczynski's One Good Turn, on the history of the screwdriver. I'm perfectly willing to read someone carefully discussing some little thing, if they've got interesting things to say.)
