One thing that indicates that this is purely arbitrary is that other languages handle it differently. In fact one difficult thing to teach English language learners is when to use the article in these situations. There’s no rule; the situations must be individually memorized as they are encountered.
I see. That’s an interesting point. It’s just weird how in certain circumstances “the” and “a” are interchangeable, when usually there is a big difference between a word with “the” before it, and a word with “a” before it.
It sort of sounds to me that if you’re ever interested in a degree in linguistics, you’ve got the beginnings of, if not a dissertation, at least a research paper figured out.
There are cases that Chronos’ explanation doesn’t quite cover. For example, someone can say “I am going to school” while on spring break. “Going to school” refers to the status of being a student, even when the person isn’t attending school at the moment.
As for why the article is omitted in some cases, think about the difference between “going to the school,” “going to a school” and “going to school.” The first refers to a school that the audience is presumed to know about already. The second refers to some school that the audience is presumed not to know about. The last doesn’t really refer directly to a school - it refers to the status of being enrolled in a school. In all the cases I can think of where the article is omitted, the phrase indicates a status rather than a place.
This doesn’t explain why this construct is used only in some cases. Why, for example, don’t people say “I am at store” to mean “I am shopping”? I don’t know, although some linguist may have figured it out.
“I went to a store to buy some milk” is not quite equivalent to “I went to the store to buy some milk”. The difference is more in what’s presupposed than in what’s asserted in those sentences. The first one has no presuppositions about what store one would commonly buy milk at. The seond one presupposes that the speaker and the hearer have established at some point (perhaps in the current conversation or perhaps long beforehand) what store one commonly buys milk at. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on presupposition:
In this entry, there is a section of presuppositional triggers. One of them is definite descriptions. In English, this mostly means uses of the word “the”. Hmm, note that it says that the presuppositional triggers given in this entry are taken from a book by Stephen Levinson, which draws on a list by Lauri Karttunen, who was my advisor in the linguistics department at the University of Texas at Austin, where I started and eventually gave up on a Ph.D.
This is a well-known exception.
Some other exceptions
There is a certain amount of pure arbitrariness in any language, for example:
I saw it on TV.
I heard it on the radio.
This arbitrariness is why most people give up and say it’s just so, but often there are reasons which can be explained.
In practice, though, I don’t think that holds up. The locution is widely used in conversation between any two people, and not just between two people who are close enough to know each other’s daily habits.
In that case they have established in the current conversation what store they are talking about.
Nope. Places such store, and library take “the” even if both parties have not established which one they are talking about.
For example, my mother can call from the States and ask if I’m in. My wife can say “He’s gone to the store.” which is common and correct, even though my mother will not know which store I’m at.
I believe in Italian they say “in forno” (in oven) rather than “nel forno” (in the oven).
In the case of abstract nouns, the article is often omitted, as in phrases like “deep in thought”, “coming into fashion”, “out of practice”, “in pain”, etc. (Though, depending on context, one can also have “a thought”, “a fashion”, “a pain”.)
The effect of omitting “the” in the case of “school”, “college”, etc., seems to suggest that in this context, the noun is not being treated as a count noun, but as an abstract noun.
This suggests an idea of “school” as an overarching and universal cultural experience that transcends any individual brick-and-mortar school or local school system. Library (for whatever reason) doesn’t exist in that way in our culture; there are only individual libraries.
Another interesting pair is “government”; “the government”.
Not in my dialect. I can’t imagine saying to someone, “He’s gone to the store” unless what store he’s gone to has been established. I would say, “He’s gone shopping.” The only case where I can imagine saying “I’m going to the library” without previous context would be at work, where the library for my agency is just downstairs and perhaps my coworker would know of it, so perhaps there would be a context.
You will not find a better answer to this than “Because they do”. If you can find a principled difference between “at college” and “at the/a university”, then my hat’s off to you. As someone upthread said, language isn’t always logical. In Canada, just like England, they say “at university” (and college, means usually a 2 year institutions, what Americans called a junior college, and no one quite believes me when I say my daughter went to Williams College and then to grad school).
Language is sometimes utterly idiosyncratic.
Thanks for all the interesting discussion everyone! And, I say “go to the store” and “go to the library” and all their ilk even to people who would have no idea what store or library I’m talking about… in fact, I might say it not even knowing what store or library I’m talking about.
If my boyfriend says to me, “I’m going to the store to buy some milk,” I will have some idea of the store he’s going to, but it could still be one of many. Maybe since he’s buying milk he’ll just go to the corner convenience store. Or, maybe since he likes Kroger, he’ll go there. Or maybe he will just go to Randall’s. It really doesn’t matter to me what store he’s at, but unless I’d clarify it with him “the store” literally gives me no indication where he’s going. He may have well have said, “I’m going to a store to pick up some milk.”
Hmmm… I asked this very same question years ago, but I focused on geographic names:
I swam in THE Pacific Ocean.
I swam in THE Brazos River.
I swam in Deer Creek.
I swam in Lake Travis.
I climbed the Alps.
I climbed the Matterhorn.
I climbed Mt. Everest.
I don’t think I got a definitive answer. What’s especially interesting about this is that no one EVER seems to get it wrong.
Were English a top-down designed language, like the C programming language or the Unix operating system, I could understand the OP’s confusion about inconsistencies.
But English is an organically evolved, capacious, inclusive amalgam of diverse influences. Trying to make sense of its goofball inconsistencies leads to frustration. It’s like trying to understand “why bowties?”
What bugs me:
valid, invalid: I get it.
valuable, invaluable: I don’t get it.
flammable, inflammable: I really don’t get it.
Maybe only Cecil Adams knows…
It’s not so much that I’m confused or frustrated… I was just pontificating about something I noticed and was wondering if there were a reason for what I had “discovered” so to speak.
I kind of like the theory that we evolved requiring “the” before certain locations because when language was evolving, there was typically only one store, one library, one beach, etc that we could be talking about. So therefore we say “to the store, to the beach, to the library” even though we aren’t actually specifying any particular store, beach or library.
“We evolved” saying it that way? Huh? You mean cave men had a store and a library that they regularly visited?
Utter nonsense. The fact that British English and American English varies on this should make this obvious.
The original word was “inflammable,” which derived from the verb “inflame” meaning “to burst into flames” (there are other, metaphorical meanings of “inflame,” but those aren’t irrelevant to this discussion). “Inflammable” means “able to burn, capable of bursting into flames.”
However, because of the common prefix “in-” meaning “not,” people sometimes think the word “inflammable” means the opposite of what it really does mean. You really don’t want someone thinking that the word “inflammable” on a propane tank means it doesn’t pose a fire hazard. For clarity’s sake, people created the word “flammable.” The words are synonyms, but you rarely see the word “inflammable” on a safety label.
But adverts for products etc will say “in store now”.