Will "a" or "the" be presumed in this scenario? [closed]

Suppose a native English-speaking witness in court is testifying about what she saw. The story, as previously narrated by the witness in her written statement, starts with a certain identified/named person, known to be a farmer, arriving at a certain place.

So, when asked to tell the story again, verbally, not looking at the previous statement, she starts: "Farmer came along and...".

Does she mean "a farmer" or "the farmer"?

Solution 1:

It means "the farmer".

It would be uncommon to see someone use that phrase in testimony (this is just sloppy speech in all likelihood), but in legal writing (e.g. contracts and court filings) it is common to define the term "Farmer" to mean, as a proper noun, the person described initially, and to use that term for the remainder of the document as a proper noun.

One reason this is done is that it allows the writing to prepare a generic form that is descriptive enough to obviously refer to a particular person, in which someone using the form can fill in one blank with the actual name of the person being referred to in this particular filing or contract, without having to make changes throughout the body text.

It is also used this way when the actual proper name of the person in question is not known, or when the actual proper name of the person in question is long or hard to pronounce (or has negative ethnic connotations that one fears could cause the court to act with implicit prejudice).

In court filings, this is sometimes done when there are many people with names that could be easily confused by a reader in the discussion easier to read, by emphasizing the role that someone plays in the legal dispute in a way that is relevant to the court reading it, rather than their particular name.

So, for example, rather than referring to John Smith who gets legal services from Jim Beam, the document might define "John Smith" when first used in the document as "Client" and "Jim Beam" when first used in the document as "Attorney". This way, a reader who forgot the names of the parties from the initial description of facts can jump into reading the document in the middle and properly analyze the legal rights of the parties and easily compare them to similar cases where people have those roles.