Learn English – In the same way / The same way

They both can be used to ask about the basis of an observation that something is wrong. However, there is a subtle difference.

The question What's with him? almost always indicates that the speaker thinks that there is something wrong with him or his behavior.

The sentence What's up with him? can be used to mean the same thing, if there is a context indicating that there is a concern. However, this sentence can be used in a neutral, non-critical way.

I know Jim was trying to decide about his next job. What's up with him?

I can be a simple inquiry, where What's with him? is almost always negative.

Often the inflection is used as a clue. For the phrase What's with him? the emphasis is often a very exaggerated stress on the with as in

What's WITH him?

It also could be an exaggerated emphasis on him

What's with HIM?

In the neutral use of the alternative, there might be a slight emphasis on two words

What's up with him?

A noun phrase (NP) can be definite or indefinite:

• One way to mark an NP as definite is to use the definite article the.
• One way to mark an NP as indefinite is to use the indefinite article a.

A speaker marks an NP as definite when they assume the listener will be able to identify what the NP refers to. They mark an NP as indefinite when they don't make this assumption.

Some other words have semantics that are only compatible with either definiteness or indefiniteness. For example, same is definite; if you use it, you're specifying what the NP it modifies is referring to. There are two possibilities:

• Same can indicate that the NP refers to something previously mentioned. In this case, the listener must be able to identify what that referent is.
• Same can indicate that two or more things co-refer (meaning they refer to the same thing). That means the listener is able to identify what these things refer to (each other), even if they don't know anything else about them and they haven't been previously mentioned. That's enough to count as definite in English.

Since same only make sense in definite contexts, it can combine with the, and it can't combine with a. For this reason, *a same name is not standard English.