ARTICLES

                             ARTICLE ON ENGLISH ARTICLES

                                                 (a,an,the)

Articles in English (a, an, the) are the small words with big trouble in all the four basic communicative skills (LSRW) of English. According to a native speaker of English the secret of learning English lies in “learning to use the small words in a big way”. These articles car to be pronounced without stress in connected speech. Whereas Indian learners always mispronounce these small words with stress as in their mother tongues. Thus their English becomes unintelligible.

Articles are sometimes included under the heading “Parts of Speech” and making it ‘nine’ instead of eight.  Some grammar books describe these words as ‘determiners’ or adjectives’.

Grammarians have identified five types of articles as mentioned below.

·         Definite Article ‘the’

·         Indefinite Article ‘a, and an’

·         Partitive Article ‘some’

·         Negative Article

·         Zero article or no article

1. Definite Article ‘the’:

The definite article ‘the’ is always when an object is mentioned for the second time and when it is stressed for its importance.

           E.g. This is the dog that bit me yesterday

                   I live in a house. The house is beautiful                                                              

                  The car over there is mine

The definite article is used before any unique objects, mountains, oceans, rivers and before a collection of states. E.g. The United States of America

The indefinite article is pronounced in two different ways according to the first sound of the word. If the first letter of the word is pronounced like consonant, it is pronounced as

 / / and in places before vowel sounds, it is pronounced as / /.

            E.g. The doctor

                   The Engineer

2. Indefinite Articles:

Indefinite articles are used before singular nouns. If the nouns begin with consonant sound, the article ‘a’ is used before it.

  

           E.g. A book

                

                  A University

The article ‘a’ is used before the nouns beginning with the following consonant letters.

            B, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l m n ,q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, and z 

Anyhow as mentioned above, when these consonant letters become silent and the nouns are pronounced with the initial vowel sound, the article ‘an’ is used before it.

             E.g. An hour

                   

                    An historian

                   An MLA, an MP, an NCC student

The article ‘an’ is used before nouns with vowel sounds. i.e. a, e, i, o, u. In the same way, nouns beginning with vowel letters are not pronounced with vowel sounds, the article ‘a’ is used before the nouns. 

                E.g. A University

                     

                       A union

3. Partitive  article;

A partitive article is a type of indefinite article uses with a mass noun such as water to indicate a non-specific quantity of it. The word ‘some’ is used in this way and it is considered to be a determiner.

              E.g. Some water

                      Some sugar

4. Negative Article:

A negative article specifies ‘none’ and can thus be regarded as neither definite nor indefinite. Some linguists consider it as a determiner rather than an article. In English, this function is fulfilled by the word ‘no’ which can appear before a singular or plural noun.

           E.g. No man is an island

                  No dogs are allowed here

5. Zero Article:

The zero article is the absence of an article before a particular kind of nouns. In English, the zero article rather thae indefinite article is used with plurals and mass nouns.