Talk:in church

in church
PP: Attending a worship service at a church.

The definition given is simply in: + church:. A few other prepositions can be used in the same kind of bare-noun prepositional phrase: at, for, before, after, during, from, to, and probably more. DCDuring TALK 14:15, 23 June 2012 (UTC)


 * These nouns differ slightly depending on dialect (jail, hospital). I think they should be handed on the noun page. Definitions 4 and 5 of church seem to be getting at this, but the sample sentence of 4 is confusing (the quotation seems spot-on). --BB12 (talk) 18:32, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * The usex for sense 4 is ambiguous. It could be just a place. Such ambiguous usage is fairly common. I have the same problem, only worse, with [[bed]].
 * The citations at [[in church]] can and should be redeployed both to Citations:in church and to [[church]] under the appropriate senses. DCDuring TALK 18:54, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * ✅ DCDuring TALK 19:12, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * [[in hospital]] should be kept because of the need to "translate" from UK English to US English "in the hospital". In hospital still simply sounds wrong to my American ears. Some other bare-noun prepositional phrases we have seem to me idiomatic or otherwise includable and some not. DCDuring TALK 19:01, 23 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I looked at the sample sentence again and changed my mind. I've always taken "in church" in this sense to mean the building, but I agree now with this definition. In any case, I like the idea of keeping "in hospital" as you say but deleting "in church." --BB12 (talk) 19:43, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't agree with that reason for keeping [[in hospital]]. Note that Britons also say, , and so on. It's a property of the word , not of specific phrases that use the word; the fact that the property is dialect-specific does not change this. —Ruakh TALK 15:19, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
 * OK. I could go with that. DCDuring TALK 16:08, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with Ruakh (not that this discussion is about that entry). (There's past discussion at [[talk:in the hospital]].) &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 17:22, 27 June 2012 (UTC)


 * IMO "in church" means "inside a church", it's preposition + noun, and this kind of discussion just suggests that we need a WikiGrammar (grammar book) as well as a Wiktionary (dictionary). Equinox ◑ 20:50, 26 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 17:22, 27 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Deleted. — Ungoliant (Falai) 07:24, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

RFC discussion: June 2012
Definition: "Inside of a church, for religious purposes."

This definition doesn't fit the following usage examples:
 * They were married in church.
 * It seemed wrong to talk louder than a whisper in church.
 * DCDuring TALK 18:59, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I took a stab at it. It seems like some cases need "while" and others don't, so there's more detail than I'm covering. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:09, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I've been looking at several of these bare-noun prepositional phrases. Now maybe I can help. DCDuring TALK 12:06, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * It's certainly better. Ill remove the tag. There's still something bothering me about how these bare-noun PPs are worded and even whether they are idiomatic. It could be that there are missing senses of church along the lines of the senses I added to bed. Or the senses of bed may be excessively detailed. There are at least 20 bare-noun prepositional phrases as entries. They include some true idioms, but many of them seem grammatical, with the meaning directly following from the meaning of the preposition and some sense of the object noun that can be place, time, activity, or status. In this case in church certainly can refer to place, possibly qualified by the presence of absence of a service. But "They were married in church" suggests a sense of church as a state of the marriage activity that is less fully conveyed (by implicature) by "They were married in a/the church". I'm going to add some citations to the entry or the citation page. DCDuring TALK 12:38, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
 * It's certainly better. Ill remove the tag. There's still something bothering me about how these bare-noun PPs are worded and even whether they are idiomatic. It could be that there are missing senses of church along the lines of the senses I added to bed. Or the senses of bed may be excessively detailed. There are at least 20 bare-noun prepositional phrases as entries. They include some true idioms, but many of them seem grammatical, with the meaning directly following from the meaning of the preposition and some sense of the object noun that can be place, time, activity, or status. In this case in church certainly can refer to place, possibly qualified by the presence of absence of a service. But "They were married in church" suggests a sense of church as a state of the marriage activity that is less fully conveyed (by implicature) by "They were married in a/the church". I'm going to add some citations to the entry or the citation page. DCDuring TALK 12:38, 23 June 2012 (UTC)