Timeline for the most vs. most
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 18, 2018 at 10:35 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | You need to explain this more clearly. You're possibly confusing 'subject' and 'agent' (different in passive constructions). But in any case, you need to add support for your conjecture. (this was comment [3]; should appear before above response.) [Comments without '@' default to answerer on ELU.] // Would you reject someone looking at a 12-bar bar-chart and saying 'Most mauve squirrelfish are caught in May' if that was the highest bar? It's a matter of pragmatics (what people actually say) rather than tight logic (how precisionists wish English worked). And I've used 'most' in a subject here. | |
| May 18, 2018 at 9:34 | comment | added | Kate Bunting | If this is addressed to me, I'm not well up in the finer points of grammar terminology. It seems to me that if you say 'Most tuna are X' you mean 'the majority of the species', but 'the most tuna are caught in November' implies 'of those that are caught, the greatest number are caught in November'. I don't see a similar distinction between 'made most mistakes' and 'made the most mistakes'. | |
| May 18, 2018 at 3:22 | comment | added | JK2 | @EdwinAshworth You seem to know something about what Kate is trying to say. But I have no clue as to why being a subject or even an agent or not should affect the interpretation of 'most' with or without 'the'. Could you elaborate? Better yet, could you write up your own answer? | |
| May 17, 2018 at 8:46 | comment | added | JK2 | So, are you saying that, in They caught most tuna in early November, most tuna cannot mean "more than half" (since most tuna is not the subject)? | |
| May 17, 2018 at 8:40 | history | answered | Kate Bunting | CC BY-SA 4.0 |