Learn English – What does “a couple” mean to you, and what does “a few” mean to you

In the first example, was able to is an alternative.

In the second example, could means that the speaker was in hearing distance of the phone, but implies that the speaker didn’t answer it, at least not immediately. If the speaker had said ‘I was able to hear the phone ringing’, the speech is more likely to continue with something like ‘. . . and so I went over and picked it up.’

In the third example, (1) is not necessarily wrong. It might occur in a sentence such as ‘The doctor said that after treatment he could return to work.’ (2) suggests that not only was he able to return to work, but that he did so.

Could and able to can be interchangeable, but the context will often decide which is chosen.

I do not know whether this is correct and have nothing with which to back it up, but it is too long to go in a comment, so it’ll have to be an answer.

Personally, I would suspect that this is perhaps a usage that has spilt over from Hiberno-English.

In my experience, a more or less semantically void ‘at all’ is often used in Ireland as a fairly generic closing statement in questions (much like ‘right’ or ‘innit’ are used to make statements into questions). “Do you see him at all?” just means, “Do you see him?”. If ‘at all’ should be taken literally, it is sometimes doubled: “Do you see him at all, at all?”.

As far as I am aware (though again I’ve nothing to back it up with), the Irish usage comes originally from the way the phrase ar bith (meaning both ‘any’ and ‘at all’) is used in Irish, which differs somewhat from English ‘at all’. Overuse of an expression common in one’s native language when speaking a non-native language is very common, and this is originally one such case.

An bhfuil airgead ar bith agat? = Do you have any money?
Ar chodail tú (ar chor) ar bith? = Did you sleep at all?
An bhfaca tú ar bith é? ≈ Did you see him any?
An bhfaca tú ar chor ar bith é? = Did you see him at all?

From these examples, where ar bith sometimes means ‘at all’ and sometimes ‘any’, it is fairly easy for an Irish speaker learning English as a second language to overuse ‘at all’, leading to cases where ‘at all’ really just means ‘any’, or even less than that (“Did you see him any?” is not a very natural phrase, and English would just have, “Did you see him?”).

Ar chor ar bith (which unambiguously means ‘at all’, never just ‘any’) in Irish is a kind of ‘doubled expression’ in sound (ar X ar Y), so once ar bith was fairly solidly identified with ‘at all’ in English, I suspect it was rather a simple matter of simply creating a doubled expression in English to match the Irish one, and ‘at all at all’ was born.

The doubled expression has not (yet?) made it into British English as far as I know, but I don’t think it far-fetched to hypothesise that the weakened and seemingly improper use of ‘at all’ is something that comes from Hiberno-English.