2 Responses to “Datapoint for feature 38 and language wals_code_eng”

1. John R. Weigel, Ph.D. Says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 7:07 am

   In English usage, “a” or “an” means precisely “one.”

2. Matthew Dryer Says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 6:18 pm

   Not really. For ‘a ~ an’ to mean the same thing as ‘one’, it would be necessary that (1) any instance where one can use ‘a ~ an’, one could use ‘one’; and (2) any instance where one can use ‘one’, one could instead use ‘a ~ an’. But (2) is clearly false: ‘John was the one person I saw’ shows that ‘one’ is not specified for indefinite while ‘a ~ an’ is. And while (1) may be true in a purely semantic sense, it is not true pragmatically; if a non-native speaker of English used ‘a ~ an’ and ‘one interchangeably, we would say that they don’t know how to use ‘one’ correctly. And even if (2) were true, one might say that ‘a ~ an’ means the same thing as ‘one’, but that is irrelevant to the claim that the indefinite article in English is distinct from the numeral for ‘one’. There are languages in which there is both a dual number word in paradigmatic opposition to a plural word and possibly a singular word and the numeral for ‘two’, which is in paradigmatic opposition to words meaning ‘one’, ‘three’, ‘four’, etc. Even though in one sense, both mean ‘two’, one is a dual word and the other is a numeral. Similarly, in English, ‘a ~ an’ is an article and ‘one’ is a numeral.

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