Peculiarities of The Indefinite Article în The English Language

Introduction

The subject matter of the ensuing paper is, as presented in the title itself, The Peculiarities of the Indefinite Article in the English Language. The necessity of such an important undertaking is due to the difficulties which the English indefinite article (a/an) and zero article , which are closely connected in use, puts on display to native and non-native speakers of English. It is thus our task to shed light and bring up-to-date as well as relevant contextual examples of how the articles function and when they are to be either used or omitted.

The object of this paper is to give a theoretical overview of English grammar (focus will be laid on the indefinite and zero article- as parts of grammatical categories), on the one hand and some practical aspects of the use of the indefinite and zero article for all students learning the English language. The theoretical materials are supplied with plenty of exercises as well as with illustrating examples taken from English, American, French, Russian and Romanian authors.

The article is a structural part of speech used with nouns. But their usage differs greatly when, say two distinctive languages are confronted. As is well known, languages may be synthetic and analytical according to their grammatical structure. In synthetic languages, such as for instance Russian which derives from Slavonic branch or Romanian which is of Latin origin, the grammatical relations between words are expressed by means of inflections. In analytical languages, such as English of Germanic origin, the grammatical relations between words are expressed by means of form words and word order: for example, the roof of the house.

Owing to the scarcity of syntheticity, extreme importance acquires the contrastive analysis and confrontation of two non-native languages. We will focus only on the morphological aspect of the grammatical structure of the English language. The article, as is well known, never performs any independent function in the sentence. The structural parts of speech, among which besides the indefinite and zero article are the preposition, the conjunction and the particles, either express relations between words or sentences or emphasize the meaning of words or sentences.

We have thus so far elucidated, in a nutshell, the major concerns in our research paper. The present paper consists of two relatively autonomous parts. It has an introduction, two chapters- Chapter One: “A Theoretical Overview of the Indefinite Article and its usage in the English Language” its main subtitles being: I.1 “The Indefinite Article as Part of English Morphology” and I.2 “The Omission of the Article as a part of English Morphology” , and Chapter Two entitled “Practical Aspects of the Use of the Indefinite Article ”, having as its main sub-units: II.1 “Use of the Articles with Nouns in Set Expressions and Syntactic relations”, and II.2 “Special Difficulties in the Use of Indefinite Article and other idiosyncracies”- , conclusive remarks and an extensive bibliography (I have used more than twenty theoretical books on English grammar, for further details see Bibliography).

We hope that all the exigencies of modern English grammar are met and that the work will serve as a major theoretical assistance not only for students of Foreign Languages but also for teachers of English.

Chapter I. “A Theoretical Overview of the Indefinite Article and its usage in the English Language”.

I.1 “The Indefinite Article as part of English Morphology”

The article is a structural part of speech used with nouns. There are two main articles in Modern English, namely: the indefinite article and the definite article. An article, from a grammatical point of view, is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of reference being made to the noun. The use of the indefinite, definite or the omission of the zero article implies thet the object is presented as belonging to a class. Theoretical books on English grammar acknowledge that the article belongs to what is else called determiner. Words used to identify nouns are called determiners, and the articles a/an (the indefinite articles) and the (the definite article) are perhaps the most frequent of the determiners in English. In some grammars articles are considered a single part of speech; in others they are classed as adjectives. Determiners are words which quantify or identify nouns. These include articles, quantifiers, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns. Many languages lack one or more of these types of determiners.