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An article is a word that is next to a noun or any word that modifies a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun.
Articles can have various functions[1]:
- a definite article (English the) is used before singular and plural nouns that refer to a particular member of a group. (The cat on the mat is black.)
- an indefinite article (English a, an) is used before singular nouns that refer to any member of a group. (A cat is a mammal).
- a partitive article indicates an indefinite quantity of a mass noun; there is no partitive article in English, though the words some or any often have that function. An example is French du / de la / des, as in Voulez-vous du café ? ("Do you want some coffee?" or "Do you want coffee?")
- a zero article is the absence of an article (e.g. English indefinite plural), used in some languages in contrast with the presence of one. Linguists hypothesize the absence as a zero article based on the X-bar theory.
For other means of marking these things besides articles, see Definiteness.
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Contents
- 1 Presence in various languages
- 2 The, the English grammatical article
- 3 See also
- 4 External links
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Presence in various languages
Some languages such as Swahili rarely use articles, indicating such distinctions in other ways or not at all. Some other languages, including Persian, Latin, Polish, Russian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Slovak, Tamil, Thai and Turkish, do not have them at all, and definiteness may be indicated by words meaning "one" and "that" or by word order.
Other languages, including Welsh, Irish, Hebrew, Arabic and Macedonian and the constructed languages Esperanto and Ido, have definite articles, but no explicit indefinite articles. For example, in Welsh, the house is y tŷ, while a house is tŷ. Likewise, in Hebrew the house is הבית (ha-bayit), while a house is בית (bayit).
In the history of many languages, definite articles formerly were demonstrative pronouns or adjectives. This is seen in the evolution of the Latin demonstrative ille in the Romance languages, becoming French le, Spanish el, Catalan lo/el, and Italian il, while indefinite articles originate from or are same as the numeral for one.
Many European languages that have grammatical gender usually have their article agree with the gender of the noun (French le 'the' masculine, la feminine). Articles in several languages also change according to the number of the noun. In French, since the plural forms marked on nouns often no longer affect pronunciation, the article marks the number of the noun.
When homonyms have a different gender in these languages, the articles can differentiate them, as in Spanish, where la cólera (feminine) is "anger" and el cólera (masculine) is "cholera", or German, where die Steuer (feminine) is "the tax" and das Steuer (neuter) is "the steering-wheel", or Swedish, where en plan (common) is "a plan" and ett plan (neuter) is "a plane".
The use of articles may vary between languages. For example, French uses its definite article in cases where English uses no article, such as in general statements about a mass noun: Le maïs est un grain ("Maize is a grain").
Sometimes articles may vary by grammatical case, as in German.
The Seri language of northwestern Mexico has several definite articles which are relatively recent creations based on nominalized verbs meaning 'stand', 'sit', 'lie', 'be located', 'come' and 'go'. The definite articles therefore also provide additional information about the position of the item to which the noun refers. Furthermore, they have begun to become more grammaticalized as certain basic nouns and derived nouns begin to require one article or another. The articles are used with proper names and also between nouns and their modifiers, under certain conditions, much like in Greek. The singular indefinite article in Seri is apparently etymologically derived from the word for 'one', as in many other languages.
Both ancient and modern Greek use the definite article with proper names: ὁ Ἰησοῦς ho Iēsoûs ("the Jesus"), and, optionally, before both a noun and each of its adjectives: ὁ πατὴρ ὁ ἀγαθός ho patēr ho agathós (literally, "the father the good"; naturally, "the good father"). In Portuguese and Catalan, proper names are preceded by an article, unless the language is formal and there is no title before the name. Similarly, in German colloquial speech you may say "Ich spreche mit der Claudia" (literally, "I speak with the Claudia"); also, in colloquial northern Italian, phrases like "Ho parlato col Marco" (literally, "I have spoken with the Marco") are common. Moreover, some dialects of Catalan have an article exclusive to names, "en"/"na", although its distribution is uneven and nowadays it is more frequent to use the standard articles except in Majorca and in some formal documents.
By the same token, the words used as English articles have other grammatical functions. See A, an.
In the Scandinavian languages, the definite article can be a suffix. In Swedish, planen is "the plan", and planet is "the plane", and a double definite article is possible, in which a free-standing article (det, den, de) and the definite article suffix are used together (det vita planet "the white plane"). Curiously, planen is also the plural definite form for the neuter "the planes". Several languages in the Balkans also use suffixes for articles. This is regarded as an effect of the Balkan linguistic union. For example, in Romanian, consulul is 'the consul'. Macedonian and Bulgarian share the pattern; for example, drvo means "tree", while drvoto means "the tree" (durvo and durvoto in Bulgarian).
The, the English grammatical article
Main article: The
The word the functions primarily as the definite grammatical article in English.
The and that are common developments from the same Old English system. Old English had a definite article se, in the masculine gender, seo, feminine, and þæt, neuter. These words functioned both as demonstrative pronouns and as grammatical articles. In Middle English these had all fallen together into þe, the ancestor of the Modern English word.
Because the word the is common in movie and book titles, it is placed at the end in alphabetical lists, as in Grudge, The, so that the reader can more easily find the entry.
In some northern British dialects of English, "the" is pronounced as [t] or as a glottal stop, usually written in dialect dialogue as t', a phenomenon known as definite article reduction. It is controversially claimed that in some northern dialects around Hull the definite article has been lost: for example, I'm going down the/t'pub vs I'm going down pub, though the glottal stop is often hard to hear.
