Korean Job Discussion Forums

[raewon]

A student asked which sentence is correct:

He is the boy who won first prize in the contest.
He is the boy who won the first prize in the contest.

Personally, I prefer the first - but aren't they both "correct"? Can anyone
confirm this?

Thanks.

[The Gipkik]

Play around with it. He got the last piece of cake. He got the first piece of cake. She bought the first dress. She bought the last dress. She won the first prize in the contest. She won first prize.

They are both correct. She won first prize has taken on an idiomatic meaning from common usage. The former is correct as a grammatical statement, but the latter has superseded grammatical correctness and functions as a short cut/short form method of ranking. He won first prize, second prize, third prize are all acceptable.

[ThingsComeAround]

The article 'the' isn't necessary here.

Both are fine.

[lifeinkorea]

I think it has to do with order of things or absence of. In baseball, you can steal second base, but I wouldn't say "the second base". There is only one base being stolen.

For awards and trophies, people can come in first, second, and third place. So we have 3 possible prizes and there is hierarchy.

[BreakfastInBed]

Neither is incorrect, however, they mean different things. I think of it as hierarchical versus linear order. "First prize" is the name of the top prize given in a hierarchy of prizes, whereas "the first prize" merely means the first one of however many prizes in a sequence handed out. Although you might win first prize in a competition, the first prize awarded could be third prize.

[Triban]

He won first prize.

There probably isn't a rule for it, but listen to actual people actually speak English. No literate person would say He won the first prize, unless there were multiple prizes being given away and He won the first (of many) prizes.

[schwa]

I'd say "won first prize" to mean "came in first."

I might use "won the first prize" if I wanted to emphasize the actual prize itself.

[Tiberious aka Sparkles]

Technically, it could be considered a proper noun and capitalized as "First Prize."

[spyro25]

It is a case of phrasality of compounds - it appears that 'first prize' is now a compound noun with a single lexical meaning - this would be a relatively recent construction and i can see where the confusion from your student might come from. There has been nominalization of the typical adjective 'first'. word classes do this all the time.

'The first prize' however does not seem to be classified as such and is two composed of the adjective 'first' and the noun 'prize' in our mental lexicon that have been combined into a longer noun phrase with the determiner 'the' and the adjective modifier 'first'. This is grammatically correct of course, and is open to different modifiers such as 'the last prize' 'the booby prize' etc. You can't do that with the first sentence as 'first prize' is a single lexical item with fixed meaning.

With that in mind, native speakers almost always choose the most economical method for classificiation, so I would suggest using the first example as the better example of meaning. If you wanted to make a grammar lesson out of it, you might want to keep the second sentence in mind as well.

[Pink Freud]