English grammar - Roger Berry 2012
B3.1 Membership and forms
B3 Articles
Section B Development
The articles a/an and the are rather special members of the determiner word class. In one sense they are different from each other because they belong to the classes of indefinite and definite determiners respectively. However, in each case they represent the basic determiner. Also, they are the two of the most frequent words in English (the is in fact by far the most frequent). So they are worthy of special attention.
B3.1 Membership and forms
One of the first questions that we need to ask is: how many are there? You are probably already familiar with the definite (the) and indefinite (a/an) articles, but some grammarians have proposed a third: the ’zero’ article. Having a ’zero’ article allows us to say that all common nouns must always have a determiner. It means a simpler rule for the construction of noun phrases, but it is a rather unusual concept; see the article in D3 for more discussion.
Some grammarians also claim that some could be considered the plural of a (a dog: some dogs), but the problem is that some adds the idea of a number or quantity (although a vague one) to the plural:
There are wolves/some wolves in that forest.
Then there is the fact that some can go with noncount nouns: some money. So it is best to leave some to the quantifiers and stick with just two articles: the definite (used with both singular and plural nouns) and the indefinite (used with singular only).
The main issue is the ’meaning’ or uses of the articles, i.e. the difference between definite and indefinite. This is dealt with below under ’reference’.
Terminology
Elsewhere in the book these forms are usually referred to as a and the, but here we need these terms, partly to be able to say that ’the indefinite article has two forms: a and an’. You could not say ’a has two forms: a and an’.
The indefinite article has two forms, both in speech and writing (not to mention the stressed form): a/ǝ/ and an /ǝn/. The choice between them depends on the pronunciation of the following word; the former is used in front of consonant sounds, the latter in front of vowels (see the pronunciation symbols in the Website Reference). It is the only ’word’ in English that behaves so.
The definite article also has two unstressed pronunciations, /ðǝ/ (before consonants) and /ði/ (before vowels), but this is not reflected in the spelling.