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I came across the following sentence while reading "A Clash of Kings" book by George R. R. Martin:

He liked to watch the windows begin to glow all over Winterfell as candles and hearth fires were lit behind the diamond-shaped panes of tower and hall, and he loved to listen to the direwolves sing to the stars

Why are there no articles before "tower" and "hall"? They don't seem to be uncountable in the given context. Instead, they represent the real objects, so in this case I would have expected something like "the diamond-shaped panes of the tower and the hall".

Denis
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    Does this answer your question? Omission of the indefinite article to eliminate ambiguity Bare coordination ('He was neither man nor mouse' / 'Are you friend or foe?' / 'Using just pen and paper, work out ...'.) //// Note that the NP is coordinated here; with these and disjunctions, different rules apply. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 21 '23 at 14:13
  • Thanks for the link. I read it but I'm still not sure that it explains my question. In that answer they give somehow connected words as examples, like "cat and dog", "mother and child" and so forth, making them look like a single object, maybe. But I don't see such a connection between a tower and a hall, though I assume that my guessing may be wrong and makes me confused even more – Denis Oct 21 '23 at 14:32
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    As someone comments in response to the earlier question, "It is used a great deal in those cases where the generic is the main point of the idiomatic phrase". I know 'tower and hall' isn't an idiom, but I think the reference is not to a particular tower and a particular hall, but to all the towers and halls that are visible to the onlooker. – Kate Bunting Oct 21 '23 at 14:42

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