Which one do you prefer or are all of them correct when we assume the person still can play the guitar?
Why didn’t you tell us you could play guitar?
Why didn’t you tell us you could the play guitar?
Why didn’t you tell us you can play guitar?
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Assuming that the person still plays the guitar, I’d go for No.3. Conventionally, the first one is also correct as it does mean grammatically (consistency in tense) that the person still can play the Guitar. But in any case the definite article should precede the name of the musical instrument. If looked at from this point, not one of the sentences is correct.
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Hi Lawrence, I do agree with you when you say that the correct collocation is ‘play the guitar’ but there seem to be at least a couple of entries in the National Corpus that contain ‘play guitar’ such as this one:
That’s what they should be nicking. If it hadn’t been for me they’d never have nicked any guitars and there would have been no group. So you’re going to stand up in front of a judge and say all that, are you, Wally? No, not exactly. With Wally out of the band we could really take it seriously. But for a while we found it hard. Without him we had to struggle along with just the three of us. Steve was doing OK but he was finding it hard to play guitar at the same time as singing. Not that he was playing any flash lead parts but to keep a strong rhythm part going and sing at the same time is rather like having to twiddle both your thumbs in opposite directions at the same time. So we decided we had to look for a new singer.
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I think here the NC means ‘to play his guitar’ where ‘his’ is left out as it is implied or can be guessef from that context.
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That’s a very interesting interpretation, Lawrence. What do you make of the following quote from the NC then?
Dave Stewart owes his 70 million fortune to school bullies.’ I nearly had a nervous breakdown when I was 13,’ the 36-year-old former Eurythmic revealed yesterday.’ One good thing to come out of it was that it inspired me to play guitar and turned me into the person I am.
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As a matter of fact I do not always rely on the National Corpus for I don’t think they are as precise in grammar as we expect them to be. In this case I have no interpretation; I can’t but say that it’s ungrammatical. Please take a look at what they say about the BNC below particularly at what has been highlighted (by me) in bold under General:
Synchronic: It covers British English of the late twentieth century, rather than the historical development which produced it.
General: It includes many different styles and varieties, and is not limited to any particular subject field, genre or register. In particular, it contains examples of both spoken and written language.
By the way, does modern English posit that no definite article is necessary before the names of musical instruments as in the case of the names of games? I’m not sure though I’m curious about it.
Thank you, Torsten.
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Which one do you prefer or are all of them correct when we assume the person still can play the guitar?
Why didn’t you tell us you could play guitar?