When a hotel gives a description of the rooms in the facility, which sentence is correct and why?
All the rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.
All rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.
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2Related: difference between 'all' and 'all the'.– RegDwigнtCommented Aug 1, 2011 at 15:21
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@RegDwight: I read the related post before I asked this and it doesn't help resolve anything.– FrantisekCommented Aug 1, 2011 at 15:23
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3In that case, it would have been beneficial to include that information in the body of your question right away. Explaining why it doesn't help you would be appreciated, too. Lastly, you always have the option of putting a bounty on a question you deem unanswered or answered poorly.– RegDwigнtCommented Aug 1, 2011 at 16:35
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2 Answers
In ordinary speech and writing, I would say "all the rooms".
In a promotional context "all rooms" is common.
answered Aug 1, 2011 at 16:02
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+1 for what intuitively sounds right to me. Dropping the word "the" does indeed have overtones of "ad-speak". Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 16:52
Both are correct, because both are idiomatic shortenings of grammatically correct sentences. The elided words are clear from the context. The sentence
All the rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.
is a concise expression of the more verbose sentence
All [of] the rooms [in this hotel] are equipped with a free internet connection.
Likewise, the sentence
All rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.
is a shortened version of the sentence
[In this hotel,] all rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.
There are other possible "source" sentences, but to me, these seem to be the most likely candidates.
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You seem to imply that OP's contructions are somehow "less grammatical" because they don't include "of" and/or "in this hotel", but I don't think this has any relevance to grammatical correctness. Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 16:54
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@FumbleFingers, I'm not sure what I said that would imply that. I explicitly said that both are correct!– senderleCommented Aug 1, 2011 at 17:33
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Well, you also say they're both "idiomatic shortenings", which seems at best "questionable" to me. You might as well say "rooms" is an idiomatic shortening of "rooms available for hire", since there will be other rooms in the building that don't have an internet connection, such as the staff toilets. Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 17:35
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1@FumbleFingers, that must be the source of our disagreement. I'm thinking of "idiomatic" as meaning "linguistic usage that is grammatical and natural to native speakers of a language." You'll have to scroll down a bit to find that one; so perhaps I am using "idiomatic" somewhat idiomatically (in your sense) :).– senderleCommented Aug 1, 2011 at 21:54
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1senderle, I think that what @FumbleFingers is unhappy with is your use of "shortening", and of "source" sentence: the implication is that there is a full form, and these are shortened versions of it, hence a hierarchy of "more full" (and by implication "more correct") sentences. This is not true - the shorter and longer forms have equal status grammatically. You may not have intended this hierarchy, but it is strongly suggested by your wording. Commented Aug 2, 2011 at 11:10