This is a/the second time...

You finished all three examples with an ellipsis suggesting that there is more to come. If they are supposed to be standalone sentences, they should all finish with just one full stop. As standalone sentences, they are grammatical inasmuch as they contain all the obligatory parts of a grammatical sentence and everything is spelled correctly but I can't think of a context for any of them.

Take the one about a career, for example. If you were talking about someone's career, you'd use a possessive pronoun, not an indefinite article - "This is his second career".

emsr2d2 said:

You finished all three examples with an ellipsis suggesting that there is more to come. If they are supposed to be standalone sentences, they should all finish with just one full stop.

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Here are the full sentences:

Alexey86 said:

All these are correct and make sense, right?

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No, not necessarily. It depends what you mean by 'correct' and 'make sense'. They may or may not be.

Then we put time after second and the phrase becomes wrong. It's a mystery to me.

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Okay, let's try a different tack. What if I say it doesn't become wrong? Would that count as a satisfactory answer? I still can't work out what kind of answer you think could be satisfactory. What do you mean 'wrong' and 'incorrect'? Have you been thinking that when I've been saying your sentence is wrong that I've meant to say that it is wrong in all possible contexts, regardless of what the speaker means? I'm totally lost here. I have almost no idea what you're asking.

Can you list some of the ways that you think a piece of language can be incorrect or wrong? Can you give me an example of a sentence that you think is incorrect and why, to help me understand what you mean?

jutfrank said:

No, not necessarily. It depends what you mean by 'correct' and 'make sense'. They may or may not be.

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Well, at least they are grammatically and semantically possible.

jutfrank said:

Okay, let's try a different tack. What if I say it doesn't become wrong? Would that count as a satisfactory answer?

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I would be surprised, given your previous answers and the fact that I couldn't find a single example of it.

jutfrank said:

I still can't work out what kind of answer you think could be satisfactory. What do you mean 'wrong' and 'incorrect'? Have you been thinking that when I've been saying your sentence is wrong that I've meant to say that it is wrong in all possible contexts, regardless of what the speaker means? I'm totally lost here. I have almost no idea what you're asking.

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I don't understand why you're lost. We can use this is a second X with act, version, wave, career (at least these are possible) and other nouns, except time.
You say, "First, there's only one second time. Second, the demonstrative This works to show very clearly that there's specific reference going on. " But the same arguments can be applied to the Ludwig examples, but nevertheless, they are possible. Then, you say there's an implied for preventing us from saying this is a second time. But this is the second time also has an implied for, but it's correct.

jutfrank said:

Can you list some of the ways that you think a piece of language can be incorrect or wrong? Can you give me an example of a sentence that you think is incorrect and why, to help me understand what you mean?

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In one of my previous replies I wrote I've told you about it yesterday. Here is an example of semantic (or referential?) mistake: I bought a car yesterday. But today I've found that a steering wheel is broken.

P.S. I suggest moving this thread to the General Language Discussions.

Alexey86 said:

. . . But what do think of this example: At the front door: a stuffed eagle nested near a set of jumbo crystals. Large wooden toadstools are scattered about. The staircase leading to a second floor is printed with blue hoof prints. Giddyup, girlfriends!
(https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/fashion/aritzia-canadian-store-comes-to-soho.html)

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An article is needed there. In what you've quoted above, both a and the work.

If readers had aleady been told earlier in the article (which I won't read) that there was a second floor, then the would be better.

Alexey86 said:

Why is the not necessary there? Isn't the number of floors known to the speaker?

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At the front door: a stuffed eagle nested near a set of jumbo crystals. Large wooden toadstools are scattered about. The staircase leading to a second floor is printed with blue hoof prints.

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In this particular example, the speaker is not assuming that the number of floors is known to the listener.

Here are a couple more examples:

1. My daughter's house is not large, but it's big enough for her. [Continues with a description of the ground floor.] One interesting feature is the staircase to the first floor - it's in the kitchen. [Being British, I assume that my listeners will assume that there is a first floor; hence the definite article.]

2. My ex-wife's house has more rooms than you'd expect. [Continues with a description of the ground and first floors] At the end of the landing is a staircase leading to a second floor. [Being British, I assume that my listeners will not assume that there is a second floor; hence the indefinite article. However, the house has only one second floor, so I could have used the definite article.]

5jj said:

In this particular example, the speaker is not assuming that the number of floors is known to the listener.

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Can we apply this to my example?

"By the way, I'm building a house in Austin and finishing a second floor (this is new information to the listener + (s)he doesn't know how many floors I'm going to build).

Alexey86 said:

Can we apply this to my example?

"By the way, I'm building a house in Austin and finishing a second floor (this is new information to the listener + (s)he doesn't know how many floors I'm going to build).

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You can use it if we don't expect the house to have a second floor.

5jj said:

You can use it if we don't expect the house to have a second floor.

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Why should the listener expect that? The number of floors varies from house to house. If the listener doesn't know the number of floors I'm going to build (as it is in my example), (s)he just doesn't have grounds for such an expectation, right?

In the UK, the general expectation is that the sort of house most of us who live in houses live in has two floors.

5jj said:

In the UK, the general expectation is that the sort of house most of us who live in houses live in has two floors.

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I see. So if I changed a second floor to a third/fourth floor, the indefinite article would work well, right?

In a society where the norm is two floors, yes.

5jj said:

In a society where the norm is two floors, yes.

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And in societies with no norm at all, I guess.

Alexey86 said:

I see. So if I changed a second floor to a third/fourth floor, the indefinite article would work well, right?

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Yes, both a and the would work well.

Grammatically and logically, there's no difference between going to a second floor or to a third or fourth floor in your example.

5jj said:

In the UK, the general expectation is that the sort of house most of us who live in houses live in has two floors.

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In my US neighborhood, single-family houses are one, two, or three floors and apartment houses are two, three, or four.

In the US, there's not a general expectation. You can live in a trailer, a house, a tenement, or a high-rise apartment building.

Alexey86 said:

Can we apply this to my example?

"By the way, I'm building a house in Austin and finishing a second floor (this is new information to the listener + (s)he doesn't know how many floors I'm going to build).

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Yes, you can use a or the.

Charlie Bernstein said:

In the US, there's not a general expectation. You can live in a trailer, a house, a tenement, or a high-rise apartment building.

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I think you misunderstood 5jj's point. He wasn't saying that there is a general expectation that people live in a house. He meant that if we describe our home specifically as a "house", most people understand that to be a building with at least two floors. As someone already said, a one-story house is a bungalow. A three-storey terraced house (one with an adjoining house on each side) is frequently called a town house.

emsr2d2 said:

I think you misunderstood 5jj's point. He wasn't saying that there is a general expectation that people live in a house. He meant that if we describe our home specifically as a "house", most people understand that to be a building with at least two floors. As someone already said, a one-story house is a bungalow. A three-storey terraced house (one with an adjoining house on each side) is frequently called a town house.

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That's not the case in American English. Any permanent, fully-detached, single-family living structure is a house in American English. Duplexes and triplexes, which respectively accommodate two and three families, are also houses to us. The latter are usually more than a single level but that doesn't affect what they're called.

I'm sure then that this is one of the few differences between American and Canadian usage. In Canada, whenever you tell someone your street address they almost always ask "Is that a house or an apartment?"

It took me quite a while after I moved to Canada to learn what semi-detached and detached houses were. (The former is what Americans call half of a duplex; the latter is what we call an ordinary house.)