Morphological Characteristics
English articles are invariable. They are characterized by a simple structure.
Syntactic Characteristics
Foreign linguists think that the English article is polyfunctional. Thus, H, Poutsma and O. Jespersen mention the following functions of the English article: classifying, individualizing, generic, etc.
According to E.A. Reiman, the English article is monofunctional: it specifies the noun. The concrete ways in which articles specify nouns, in the opinion of E.A. Reiman, constitute their respective meanings or, to be more exact, shades of their two main grammatical meanings of classification and individualization.
Number of Articles
Three theories exist concerning the number of articles in Modern English.
1. There are two articles in English: definite and indefinite
[H. Poutsma; H. Sweet; L.S. Barkhudarov, D.A. Shtelingj.
2. There are three articles in English: definite, indefinite, and
zero [A.I. Smirnitsky; O.S. Akhmanova; N.F. Irtenyeva;
F.A. Litvin; T.N. Sergeyeva; R. Quirk and his co-authors; D. Biber
and his co-authors].
3. There are four articles in English: definite, indefinite, zero,
and partitive [E.N. Zvereva].
Obviously, there are two material articles: the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an. Thus, the distinction is between a language and the language.
However, a third variant is possible: There are ways of communication without language (Longman Language Activator), where the same noun language occurs without any article. Naturally, the question arises how this third variant is to be treated. The older grammatical tradition described it as 'omission of article', which is obviously inadequate since there is not the slightest reason to believe that the article in such cases was ever omitted.
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That's why many linguists look upon the absence of article as a special kind of article, namely a zero article. Some grammarians [e.g. F.A. Litvin] under the term 'zero article' understand any absence of article. The. majority of linguists, however, are of opinion that we should differentiate between the zero article, on the one hand, and omission of article, on the other.
We speak about the so-called omission of article when the article is not used where we naturally expect to find it in accordance with the rules. Thus, articles are omitted in the following cases:
1) in newspaper headlines and book titles, e.g.:
Judge refuses to drop charges against princess (Reuters), Key to the Door (A. Sillitoe);
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2) in signs, e.g.: Post Office;
3) in stage remarks, e.g.:
Lan takes letter from pocket and she almost snatches it
(M. Brand);
4) in telegrams, e.g.:
A thousand regrets but week-end off 'phoning you later. R. (D. Robins);
5) in poems for the sake of rhyme, e.g.:
I met a Woman as I went walking;
We got talking,
Woman and I.
I met a Puppy as I went walking;
We got talking,
Puppy and I (A. A. Milne);
6) in dictionaries, etc.
In all these cases, the omission of an article is a question of conciseness of style, and the definite or indefinite article can easily be inserted without affecting the meaning. Cf.:
Judge refuses to drop charges against princess —* The judge refuses to drop the charges against the princess.
Following A.I. Smirnitsky, T.N. Sergeyeva excludes all cases of stylistically preconditioned omission of articles from the notion of the zero article and qualifies the latter exclusively as 'meaningful absence of article'.
The next question is what meaning the so-called zero article has. According to T.N. Sergeyeva, the zero article has a generalizing force devoid of any classification or individualization.
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Z.K. Dolgopolova does not share this point of view. In her opinion, the so-called zero article does not have any specific grammatical meaning as opposed to the indefinite article. Having analyzed sentences of the type Water is a liquid (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English), she comes to the conclusion that there are absolutely no grounds for saying that the material noun -water with the zero article expresses a more general meaning than the material noun liquid with the indefinite article.
Both the indefinite and the zero articles commonly express non-specific reference [D. Biber et al.]. The only difference lies in the fact that the indefinite article usually combines with nouns realizing notions with clear-cut boundaries, while the so-called zero article specifies nouns the underlying notions of which lack any definite form. This difference, according to A.F. Rodionov, is purely semantic. Grammatical classifications cannot be based only on semantic criteria. Consequently, we are hardly justified in singling out a third, zero article.
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Besides, the idea of the zero article would be sound if the article were a morpheme. But the English article is a word, and the absence of a word cannot be regarded as a zero word.
True, articles are not lexical, but function words. Function words, according to A.L Smirnitsky, can be represented as zeros. But we side with B.A. Ilyish who writes that even the notion of a zero function word seems very doubtful. Really, we never speak of zero prepositions, for example.
So, it seems better to deny the existence of the zero article in English. Z.K. Dolgopolova is right: the so-cailed zero article is nothing but a grammatical variant of the indefinite article.
E.N. Zvereva singles out a fourth article in Modern English: the partitive article some, e.g.:
/ need some money (R. Murphy).
Please give me some milk (A.S. Hornby, A.P. Cowie, A.C. Gimson).
We side with English grammarians who exclude the partitive some from articles and refer it to a specific subgroup of determiners called quantifiers, namely those quantifiers that specify a moderate quantity.
Thus, there are two articles in English: definite and indefinite. The indefinite article has two forms: positive and zero.
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SYNTAX
Syntax is often regarded as the heart of grammar because the main function of language - the communicative function - is realized at the syntactic level. Little variation in the grammatical structure of English words is another reason why syntax forms the dominant element in a modern English grammar.
Syntax is a many-sided phenomenon. The following aspects of syntax can be singled out: 1) logical syntax, 2) psychological syntax, 3) formal syntax, 4) semantic syntax, 5) communicative syntax, 6) pragmatic syntax.
Logical,syntax goes back to Antiquity. The Stoics were the first to use the term 'syntax'. Logical syntax dominated in linguistics till the middle of the 19th century. The logical school did not differentiate syntactic and logical categories. Compare the following definitions of the sentence and its parts given by English grammarians. 'A sentence, - writes W.J. Hort, - is a collection of words placed to communicate ... some proposition or assertion.' 'The subject is that which is spoken about. The predicate is that which is said of the subject' [G. Curme],
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Syntactic and logical categories are indeed closely interwoven. However, there can be no identity between them because they represent categories of two different branches of science. The following facts prove it unequivocally. First, the proposition is traditionally defined as a type of thought that comprises assertion or negation. It is only declarative sentences that make direct statements. Hence, the question arises if we are justified in referring interrogative and imperative constructions to the class of sentences, too. Second, all propositions have a binary structure: subject + predicate <cy&-beKm + npeduxam>. (Some logicians single out a third element in the structure of the proposition: a copula. But, as a rule, the copula is included into the predicate.). As for sentences, they can be not only two-member but also one-member, e.g.:
Tell me the bad news first (S. Sheldon).
And finally, the grammatical subject and predicate do not always correspond to the logical subject and predicate, e.g.: / know that and Charles knows that (E. O'Connor), where the grammatical subjects 7 and Charles realize the logical predicates, while the grammatical predicates know and knows realize the logical subjects.
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In the second half of the 19th century, as a reaction against these shortcomings of logical syntax, there emerged psjcjtio logical syntax whose adherents denied any connection between syntax and logic, the sentence and the proposition. They declared that the sentence expresses not a logical, but a psychological proposition. The psychological proposition is defined by them as a combination of a psychological subject and a psychological predicate connected into a unity by a wilful act of the speaker.
As we have already shown, there are no grounds for identifying syntactic and logical phenomena. On the other hand, we are hardly justified in opposing them because, in spite of being different, syntactic and logical phenomena are cognate.
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The main contribution of the psychological school to linguistics consists in the fact that its representatives noticed an important detail: the absence of direct correspondence between sentence parts and the components of the psychological proposition. According to H. Paul, for instance, any sentence part can function as psychological subject and psychological predicate.
Linguists in English-speaking countries did not develop the ideas of psychological syntax.
Traditional syntax is formal because it focuses on a study of the structure of syntactic units. The term 'syntax' comes from Latin 'syntaxis' and earlier from Greek 'syn + tassein' which means 'together + arrange'. In other words, most syntactic units consist of several components. The components of syntactic units stand in certain relations to one another. The relations between the components of syntactic units find their expression in different types of syntactic connection. That's why types of syntactic connection and language means of their expression constitute one of the problems that formal syntax tries to solve.
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