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a. Tom, who played the role of the protagonist in the movie, was the real-life stepbrother of Jim, who played the villain.

b. Tom, who played the role of the protagonist in the movie, was a real-life stepbrother of Jim, who played the villain.

Does (a) necessarily imply that Jim had only one real-life stepbrother?

Does (b) necessarily imply that Jim had more than one real-life stepbrothers?

I think if one were consistent, one would conclude on stepbrother from (a). (b) would be a little more open to interpretation (maybe the speaker doesn't know how many stepbrothers he had).

But I think people aren't really consistent when it comes to these structures.

Many thanks.

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I think that both (a) and (b) would have the same meaning to most fluent speakers, and neither implies anything about how many stepbrothers (beyond 1) Jim has. I think (a) is much more likely to be used than (b) is, unless the speaker is going to speak about Jim's other stepbrothers.

I am not sue of the technical term for this use of "the", but sometimes it implies existence, not uniqueness.

  • "Caroline Kennedy is the daughter of John F. Kennedy" (In fact she is the only daughter)
  • "Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was the son of Johann Sebastian Bach". (JSB had several sons.)
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Suppose You say "She is the daughter of Mr Brown". It means that Mr Brown has only one daughter that is relevant in this context.

It means that "daughter of Mr Brown" completely determines who the person is, given the context.

For example, suppose Mr Brown has daughters: Rosie aged 20 and Mary aged 15.

You are at Mary's school and you are introduced to Mary. The person might say "This is Mary Brown, she is the daughter of Mr Brown." There is only one daughter relevant to this context. There are no other daughters of Mr Brown at the school, so saying "daughter of Mr Brown" identifies "Mary" in the context of "children at school".

As usual, "the" is used when the noun phrase is determined (and no other determiner is being used)

Sometimes the context can be fairly 'thin', perhaps only based on "the one we are talking about". This is quite common in newspapers. "Harry, the son of King Charles, said ..."

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    The trouble with that argument is that "relevant context" is often so thin as to be almost indeterminable. The NOW (News of the Web) corpus has more than ten times as many instances of "is the daughter of" as "is a daughter of" (15720: 1113), and looking randomly into the list, generally the only relevant context is something like "this is the daughter I am talking about, and whether she has any sisters or not is irrelevant".
    – Colin Fine
    Feb 8 at 20:57
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    I agree, the main point of my answer was that you can't assume that "the" implies that Mr Brown has only one daughter.
    – James K
    Feb 8 at 21:11
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    Indeed, you can't. But my finding tends to confirm @DavidSiegel's thought that the is much more likely to be used than a even when there is no special context.
    – Colin Fine
    Feb 8 at 21:49

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