Timeline for When to use an article before "reason"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 23, 2014 at 0:42 | comment | added | QuentinUK | let us continue this discussion in chat | |
| Feb 23, 2014 at 0:42 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | "He must have some reason for doing it" - particularly (but not necessarily) with stress on some seems to suggest to me there is a reason (countable) that we just don't know. Not that there is some element of [uncountable] reason involved. | |
| Feb 23, 2014 at 0:39 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | You have me at a disadvantage there! I can't reproduce them either - I know I cut&pasted the figures because I specifically went back and deleted the commas after the "thousands". I've no idea how I got the figures though (I usually include links, but I knew four of them wouldn't fit along with all my text there). In light of that I shall cancel my downvote (as I write, I see your edit; I shall reverse the downvote! :) | |
| Feb 23, 2014 at 0:38 | history | edited | QuentinUK | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Remove "more common"
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| Feb 23, 2014 at 0:37 | comment | added | QuentinUK | To avoid arguments I'll remove the "more common" bit. But I think "have some reason" as an uncountable mass noun would be equivalent to "have reason" so uses an extra word unnecessarily. | |
| Feb 23, 2014 at 0:23 | comment | added | QuentinUK | Different searches get different results, eg Google Web "There is a reason" google.co.uk/#q=%22There+is+a+reason%22 = About 1,430,000,000 results but also "There is reason" google.co.uk/#q=%22There+is+reason%22 = About 40,500,000 results. | |
| Feb 23, 2014 at 0:15 | comment | added | QuentinUK | @FumbleFingers I could not reproduce your results eg "I have reason to do so." google.co.uk/#q=%22I+have+reason+to+do+so.%22&tbm=bks returns "About 12,100 results" but has a list of 16 books, so I don't know what's going on. | |
| Feb 23, 2014 at 0:05 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | I'm not sure what you mean by "the countable forms, are more common". The counts (sorry! :) from GB show that A occurs far more often than all the others put together. I had to change "this" to "so" because all OP's variants are uncommon (barely a dozen results in total). I know things change again if we switch to for doing this, but that's a different construction again. Hunter is mistaken - D is perfectly okay in the right context for both senses - countable: some particular but unspecified reason; uncountable: some aspect or amount of reason. | |
| Feb 22, 2014 at 23:42 | comment | added | QuentinUK | @FumbleFingers I mean that the countable forms, are more common. B, C and D being examples of countable forms. The non-countable form A is less common. p.s. hunter also says countable forms are more common than the non-countable forms. hunter: "we don't use the mass noun construction very often." p.p.s. I disagree with hunter when I think D is also an example of the countable form. | |
| Feb 22, 2014 at 17:17 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Your first assertion is simply wrong. Since to do this isn't a particularly common form (idiomatically we'd normally say for doing this), I checked to do so in Google Books. The results for that preceded by OP's four variants are A:32600, B:4910, C:6550, D:1830. And I don';t agree that A derives from "being reasonable" - it's primarily a singular reference to [a] specific reason. | |
| Feb 21, 2014 at 16:55 | history | answered | QuentinUK | CC BY-SA 3.0 |