ESL General English Grammar Questions

Re: the car door...

Jacek From Kwidzyn (Pomesania) — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 22:42:50 GMT

thank you Clive,
best wishes,
Jacek

Re: the car door...

Jacek From Kwidzyn (Pomesania) — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 22:11:33 GMT

thank you very much, Rishonly,
and best wishes from Poland,
Jacek

Re: the car door...

rishonly — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 22:00:24 GMT

Hi Jacek,

To me, the second sentence seems better but the natives can explain more on this. The first half of the first sentence--"A car door had not been locked"-- uses an indefinite article "A" and doesn't refer any specific car or car door,but the second half of the sentence uses a definite article "The" and refers a specifc car alarm. That makes the sentence a bit odd, in my opinion.

Besides, If you don't want to mention a specific door, then you can write the sentence as --One of the car doors was not locked ,and the car alarm went off.

Re: the car door...

Clive — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 21:49:06 GMT

Hi,

I have found in many sources I could get that the only possible way of combining together 'door' and 'car' is "the door car"... There's no such thing as a 'door car'. I think you mean a 'car door'.

By coupling the plunger arm to the existing rod within the car door which moves the door lock mechanism.... When we are describing a process or mechanism like this, we often, but not always, use definite articles. I guess it's because we have begun by saying we are going to describe a locking mechanism for a car door. Now we can be specific in the description that follows.

I hope this answers your question. If not, please write again.

Best wishes, Clive

Re: the car door...

Jacek From Kwidzyn (Pomesania) — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 20:06:24 GMT

hi Rishonly,
thank you for your reply.
You are right about this you had written, of course.

I know there is a combination : noun attribute + noun eg
a) a horse race /horse : attribute
b) a race horse / race : attribute
...but I did not mean this when writing my previous post...

To put it another way, I just had asked why one cannot say "a car door" if no specific of the four doors is meant.
I did not found such a sentence on the Internet where the expression " a car door" had been used.
Will a native English speaker say:
1) A car door had not been locked and the car allarm went off.
Note: before the car allarm it seams to me very clear to use "the" since there is only one car alarm in this car (at least so can we assume).
or rather this sentence will be better for him/her?
2) The car door had not been locked and the car alarm went off.

best regards
Jacek

Re: the car door...

rishonly — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 18:54:03 GMT

Hi Jacek,

You mentioned:"I could get that the only possible way of combining together 'door' and 'car' is "the door car". Depending upon the context, we can say 'car door' or '...door car'.

For example,

The car door was damaged by an accident (car + door)

Nissan Altima is a four-door car (door + car)

the car door...

Jacek From Kwidzyn (Pomesania) — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 18:25:06 GMT

Hello all volounteer teachers!

I have found in many sources I could get that the only possible way of combining together 'door' and 'car' is "the door car"...
We are using in such cases the definite article even though we do not exactly know which one of the , let's say, four doors has to be meant: the front one on the left.. or maybe on the right etc..

Does it sound bad if we tell 'a car door", when we do not want to specify??
e.g.
By coupling the plunger arm to the existing rod within the car door which moves the door lock mechanism....

Thank you in advance to all willing to share their knowledge on this amazing web-forum.....

Jacek,