The problem of the Articles in English.
We have not included the article in our list of parts of speech; but this should not be taken to mean that it cannot be included in that list. The problem is irrelevant.
Another problem, which, though not irrelevant, appears to have been frequently misstated, is this: is the article a word or a morpheme? It has been solved in different ways by different authors. There would always be some argument in favour of the article being a separate word, and some argument to show that it was a morpheme. 1 This kind of approach, however, does not seem to be the right one. It would mean that we start examining the article, a very peculiar phenomenon, with ready-made notions of what a word and what a morpheme is. Instead we should first study the article as it actually exists and functions in the language, and only then see whether it will fit into any ready-made category. It may well happen that it will not; then we shall have to face the situation and take it for what it is worth.
NUMBER AND MEANING OF ARTICLES
It has been a long debated question how many articles there are in English. Obviously there are only two material articles, the definite article the and the indefinite article a (an). The distinction thus is between, for instance, the language and a language. How ever, the noun language, and indeed many other nouns, are also used without any article, as in the sentence Language is a means of communication. It is obvious that the absence of the article in this sentence is in itself a means of showing that "language in general", and not any specific language (such as English, or French, etc.), is meant. Hence we may say that there are three variants: (1) the language, (2) a language, (3) language. Now the question arises, how this third variant is to be treated. The older grammatical tradition described it as "omission of the article", which is obviously inadequate, since there is not the slightest reason to believe that the article in such cases was ever "omitted". Another view is that we should describe this as "absence of the article", and sometimes this notion is made more precise and the phenomenon is called "meaningful absence of article". A third view, which has been gaining ground lately, is that the very absence of the article is a special kind of article, which is then termed "zero article". According to this view, then, there would be three articles in English: definite, indefinite, and zero.
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This idea of a zero article takes its origin in the notion of "zero morpheme", which has been applied to certain forms in inflected languages, — namely to forms having no ending and differing by this very absence from other forms of the same word, which have each their individual ending. Still more doubtful is the notion "zero" with reference to the English article, if the article is a word. We will therefore proceed on the assumption that the notion "zero article" is only possible if the article is not a word.
The two main views of the article are, then, these: (1) The article is a word (possibly a separate part of speech) and the collocation "article + noun" is a phrase (if of a peculiar kind). (2) The article is a form element in the system of the noun; it is thus a kind of morpheme, or if a word, an auxiliary word of the same kind as the auxiliary verbs. In that case the phrase "article + noun" is a morphological formation similar to the formation "auxiliary verb + infinitive or participle", which is an analytical form of the verb.
Besides those difficulties, there is the problem of the meaning of each article: we must find out whether it has one or several meanings, each of them appearing in a different context. We can illustrate this problem by comparing, for example, the two sentences: (1) The dog has come home and (2) The dog is a do mestic animal. Of course it is at once obvious that the dog in the former sentence means one individual dog, whereas the dog in the latter sentence means the dog in general, as a zoological species. The question, then, is whether the article itself has two distinct meanings (if so, the second of these is termed "the generic article") or whether the meaning of the article is the same in both sentences, and the difference in meaning between them depends on some other factor.
If we endorse the first view, we shall say that the definite article has at least two distinct meanings, viz. (1) it means that an object is singled out from all objects of the same class, (2) it means that the whole class of objects, as distinct from other classes, is referred to.
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If we endorse the second view, we shall say that the definite article has one meaning only, viz. that of something singled out from other entities. Now, whether the essence thus singled out is a separate object or a whole class depends not on the article at all but on the other elements in the sentence, usually on the predicate.
Reverting to the two sentences, (i) The dog has come home and (2) The dog is a domestic animal, we shall see that each of the predicates has several peculiarities which influence the meaning of the sentence one way or another. Let us analyse each of these. First, the grammatical peculiarities. In (1) the predicate is a verb in the present perfect tense, in (2) it is a group "link verb + predicative", and the link verb is in the present tense. That of course would not in itself be sufficient to show the different meanings of the sentences, but it does give a certain indication this way: the verb in the present perfect tense is more likely than not to express a concrete action (i. e. one that has taken place once), while the group "link verb in the present tense + predicative" is very likely to express some general characteristic.
Now, these grammatical points are supplemented by some lexical points, which make the difference quite clear. In (1) the verb come and the adverb home denote a concrete physical action and the place to which it is directed, while in (2) the predicative a domestic animal denotes a zoological idea and thus proves that by the dog is meant not an individual dog but the whole species. According to this view, then, the meaning of the definite article itself is the same in both sentences, and the difference proceeds from the peculiarities of the predicates and the words expressing them.
In coming now to the difference in meaning between the definite and the indefinite article, we should start by comparing two sentences which are exactly alike in everything except that one has the definite article where the other has the indefinite. We ought to find several pairs of this kind, and then try to get at the essence of the difference between them. So let us take these two, in the first place: Give me a newspaper, please! and Give me the newspa per, please! Here the difference is obvious: the one sentence means, 'Give me some newspaper, no matter which', and the other means, 'Give me that particular newspaper that you are reading at the moment, or the one that is lying on the table, or the one that you had in your hand as you came in', etc., depending on the situation. Of course many similar pairs of sentences might be found. Here, then, the difference is that between "individual object with its own characteristics", and "some object belonging to that particular class of objects". This may indeed be called the difference between definite and indefinite in the usual sense of the words.
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However, this distinction will not apply to all cases and we must proceed to look at the sentences where the line of distinction is of another kind. Let us now take these two sentences, The door opened, and the young man came in, and The door opened, and a young man came in. We need not deny that at the bottom of this distinction there is one between "definite" and "indefinite"; however, another element has come in here, which may be briefly described like this. We can only say The door opened, and the young man came in, if we knew in advance that the person standing, say, in the corridor was a young man; if there was a knock at the door, and we did not know who had knocked, and we said, "Come in," we can only say, The door opened, and a young man came in, which might be made more explicit in the following way, ...and the per son who came in proved to be a young man (implying, not an old man, not a young girl, etc.). Thus the fact that it was a young man would be new, it would be the central point of the sentence. Coming back now to the sentence with the definite article, we can say that its meaning is approximately this, The door opened, and the young man (did not stay out but) came in'. Here, then, the central point would be that he came in. 1 Now, this element of the sentence which is the central point may be said to correspond to the semantic predicate, or the rheme. 1 Then the indefinite article, as opposed to the definite article in sentences of this kind, would be a means of expressing the semantic predicate of the sentence. How should we then define its meaning? To use the simplest words possible, we might say that the indefinite article expresses what is new, and the definite article expresses what is known already, or at least what is not presented as new. This opposition would then be superimposed on that between definite and indefinite.
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When we consider the absence of the article, we have to distinguish between the singular and the plural number. Broadly speaking, the absence of the article with a noun in the plural corresponds to the indefinite article with that noun in the singular, whereas the absence of the article with a noun in the singular stands apart and does not correspond to anything in the plural.
We will first consider the absence of the article with a noun in the singular and start with nouns which can equally be used with the definite and the indefinite article and without any article. One of these is the noun language. We take three sentences: Language is a means of communication. English is the foreign language I know best. Everyone must study a foreign language. The difference here is obvious enough. Language without article does not refer to any one language (Russian, English, German, etc.) but to the general idea of that means of communication.
The absence of the article with a noun in the plural is the only possibility in sentences expressing general statements, such as, Dogs are domestic animals, or Goose quills were in common use formerly. The article is also absent in such sentences as, Pencils, pens, and sheets of paper were strewn all over the table, where indefinitely large quantities are meant.
Another peculiar case is that of the absence of the article with nouns used in pairs. A typical example is the sentence In the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and market place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild and church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing more than knight and baron to make England what she is . . . (J. R. GREEN) No article is found here either with the noun knight or with the noun baron. If only one of these nouns had been used, the article could not possibly be absent. This also applies to the other nouns in this sentence, and this usage may be found elsewhere. It appears to be strictly literary.
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