Questions tagged [articles]
Indicates definiteness or indefiniteness of a noun, member of a small class of determiners.
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Besides English, "a" and "an". which other language uses separate articles before vowels? [duplicate]
In English, "a" changes to "an" before a vowel or a silent "h". Is there any other language where the article changes its form depending on whether it precedes a ...
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Request for research papers on the definite article systems of French and Italian
Extrapolating from this survey of article systems throughout world languages, the only languages which brought the article system which originated in Ancient Greek to its fullest logical generality ...
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What is the survey of definite article systems throughout the world?
Different languages have different ways of implementing articles.
English has a very simple system, of simply "the" and "a". However, there is some irregularities regarding when ...
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Albanian, usage of definite nominative for proper nouns
I am learning Albanian using the book "Discovering Albanian". In chapter 2, the book introduces the definitive form of the nominative case and explains how to use it whit proper names.
It is ...
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Is there a rule when the use of the definite article on proper nouns is appropriate in Semitic languages?
As far as I understand, according to the conventional grammar of Hebrew (and likely other Semitic languages), the definite article is typically only be attached to common nouns, but not to proper ...
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What are the current views on the existence of a "zero article" in English?
As is well known, under certain circumstances in English, there can be acceptable noun phrases (NPs) that lack a determiner. Some cases include:
(i) "indefinite uncountable nominals" (There ...
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Programmatically determining the form of the English indefinite article
Not sure if this is the correct place for this question. I am writing some code to place the correct indefinite article before a given noun. To do this I am looking at the first letter of the noun to ...
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has any language ever lost articles? [duplicate]
many languages have articles (words translating as "a" and "the"); at the same time many languages lack articles. are there any known cases of a language having articles but losing ...
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Why don't topic-prominent languages have articles/determiners?
I just discovered topic-prominence and am curious how it works in Chinese in complex cases. But mainly for this question, wondering what Wikipedia means by:
They do not have articles, which are ...
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If the definiteness of a noun is dependent on the article that introduces it, can the gender of that noun also depend on that article?
If a chair can become the chair, can a noun's gender change depend on the article that introduces it? My understanding is that the classifier concentrates on the similar characteristics of the noun ...
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How to translate words like "the" to other languages?
So this question boils down to, how do you teach someone in Inuktitut (or elsewhere) about the word "the" (or "a")? How do you translate phrases like "the big red tree" ...
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Portuguese — Why use definite articles in front of possessive nouns? Why the extensive use of proposition contraction?
I can speak Spanish and French, and I am currently learning Portuguese. During my learning, I realized that there are some unique features in Portuguese — I don't speak Italian, so I don't know if ...
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How much more often is a definite article used with a noun than an indefinite article in the English language?
I'd be happy if I could get an overall answer to this question, but if someone is also capable of breaking this down by
single vs. plural nouns
nouns as subject vs. nouns as direct objects
nouns as ...
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What does Eastern Aramaic have to say about "(definite) articles are acquired, not lost"?
The current answers on Definite/indefinite articles vs. inflections agree that (definite) articles are acquired by languages, not lost.
I'm wondering what Eastern Aramaic has to say about this. ...
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Definite/indefinite articles vs. inflections
While some languages have definite/indefinite articles (a/an/the in English, le/la/les and un/une/des in French), others don't (Russian, Latin). In this connection I have a few questions:
Chicken or ...
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On the etymology of Balearic Catalan personal articles "en/na"
Catalan (like certain regional dialects of Spanish and Italian) uses definite articles before proper names:
El Pere ha arribat tard aquest matí.
La Maria ha arribat tard també.
In eastern (Balearic) ...
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Is wrong article use a matter of pronunciation or grammar?
I was in a discussion with someone, where they described my wrong use of an article as a "mispronunciation". I argued it was rather a matter of grammar, as I did pronounce the article correctly, but ...
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On an apparent " masstermization" phenomenon in contemporary informal French: " il y a de la jolie nana par ici"
I have noticed a tendency to " masstermize" nouns in contemporary informal French, I mean to use nouns as mass terms ( uncountable), though they cannot be strictly used in this way.
What I call " ...
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Are there other languages, besides English, where the indefinite (or definite) article varies based on sound?
I was talking today with an English co-worker about whether he says "an H-1B visa" or "a H-1B visa", which hinges on whether one says "aitch" or "haitch" for the letter H.
And I noticed that unlike ...
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Why is it thought that definite articles develop from deictic markers, and not the other way around?
I read here that "it is cross-linguistically common for definite articles to develop from deictic markers"; "deictic" referring to words such as "I" or "here" whose meaning is dependent on context.
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Use of the definite article in European vs. Brazilian Portuguese
When I started learning Portuguese years ago, all the books I used at the time told me that when using possessive adjectives you also have to put the corresponding definite article in front of the ...
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Understanding the purpose of determiners/articles/demonstratives in language
This was an interesting read:
Articles have developed independently in many different language families across the globe. Generally, articles develop over time usually by specialization of certain ...
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Why languages have the concept of "the"
Wondering why you write a sentence like this, with the word the:
The person went to the store.
La persona fue a la tienda.
I don't understand why that extra word needs to be there. It could just ...
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Why does Laam sometimes get pronounced as the next letter in Arabic words? [duplicate]
I'm trying to learn how to read Arabic and I noticed that sometimes the letter Laam (ل) is either silent or takes the pronunciation of the following letter, as in this text from Wikipedia:
As-...
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"Den" or "det" in Swedish
I am native Swedish speaker and I have a problem that the language seems to have no grammar in some cases. For instance there is both "en lag" and "ett lag" meaning completely different things but the ...
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Why does Italian use definite articles before possessive adjectives, except when these are followed by a singular family noun?
In Italian possessive adjectives are preceded by a definite article: “il mio amico” (the my friend), “la nostra casa”, “i tuoi libri”. The article however is always dropped with singular nouns ...
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Languages where articles occur to the right of nouns
Are there languages where articles appear—as independent words—on the right-hand side of the noun phrases they occur in - in other words after the head noun in the noun phrase?
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Are null and zero articles present in every language, conceptually, or only in English?
I have been studying Peter Master's 2003 paper regarding null and zero articles and I am still not clear if he is saying that this is a peculiarity of English or if he is saying that this is a ...
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weak definite article in Engish linguistics
I may be wrong, but I don't seem to have come across the term 'weak definite article' in English linguistics though I think I've encountered it in German or French linguistics. (I've read 'weak ...
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Borrowing words along with the articles or other grammatical parts (like Spanish from Arabic)
Disclaimer: I do not know Arabic.
Here is an example of Spanish words of Arabic origin: alacrán, albañil, alquimia...
I wonder why Spanish language borrowed so many Arabic words along with the ...
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Are there natural languages with the following properties (seen in Esperanto)?
Are there natural languages that have the following set of properties:
The language possesses nouns, adjectives, and definite articles
Nouns and adjective are both inflected for number and case (or ...
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Can an indefinite article trigger a presupposition?
One presupposition trigger is the definite article. Can an indefinite article trigger a presupposition?
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Nouns without an article as in e.g. "Empire is not always a good thing"
Consider the highlighted nouns below.
Empire is not always a good thing. (The burden of empire, like its benefit, was not equitably shared.)
Some great apes have theory of mind. (Theory may tell us ...
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Are Articles('a','an','the') bound morphemes?
"bound morpheme is a morpheme that appears only as part of a larger word; a free morpheme or unbound morpheme is one that can stand alone or can appear with other lexemes"
given that the articles ...
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Should common short words be left out of a concordance?
I'm writing a program which will be designed to take a text file, and parse all the words into a Concordance, e.g., a sort of dictionary list of all the words sorted in order, with a total count of ...
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Attached articles, are they clitics or endings?
If we take a clitic as a part of word that is attached after the ending and attached to the word depending on the word order (examples include -'s in English and -que in Latin), what would be definite ...
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Evolution of Definite Articles in Indo-European Languages [duplicate]
I am a complete layman in linguistics, so the question I have probably has no scholarly merit whatsoever. My question concerns the definite articles in Indo-European languages. Almost all Indo-...
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Articles in Indo-European Languages
I study Turkic languages. Does anybody know a comparative study of Indo-European languages and Altaic languages or a study which proves that Altaic languages have articles?
I compared some suffixes ...
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"an" -> "a" When Describing a Noun With Adjectives
Observed in fluent speech:
a unrounded vowel
To a native English speaker, the following would be expected instead:
an unrounded vowel
What's happening here? It looks like the speaker is ...
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(in)definite articles
Do any languages distinguish between indefinite and definite articles thus:
one beer 1sg-drink `I drank A beer.'
beer 1sg-drink `I drank THE/A beer.'
That is, is it possible for a language to mark ...
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The word 'all' as an article, rather than an adjective?
The grammar descriptions of some languages seem to treat words like all and no, as in 'all giraffes are yellow' and 'no pigs have wings' simply as adjectives, because the words they determine are the ...
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Origin of articles in European languages
I read that PIE, Latin, old English, and even old German did not use articles, yet current English, German and Romance languages all use articles.
Is it true that articles developed in all these ...
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Resources/papers on Portuguese nominal syntax and determiners?
I'm vaguely aware that the (definite) determiner has a much freer distribution in Portuguese than in other languages, e.g. it can come before personal names:
A Maria lê um livro.
The Maria reads a ...
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Usage of definite articles in Germanic and Romance languages
In the Germanic languages, a generic construction using the definite article with mass nouns is unacceptable. In contrast, Romance languages require the definite article to make the generic ...
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Why is the definite, indefinite, and partitive article grouped together?
According to this answer to the question : Do some languages have articles besides the definite and indefinite articles?
It is worth noting, I think, that "article" is not a theoretical
primitive ...
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What is an "adjectival article"? Apparently Albanian "të" is one
Being in Albania I decided to sit down with a word frequency list of the language and look each up so I would know some of the common words I see around me.
The second most common word in Albanian is ...
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How is definiteness expressed in languages with no definite article, clitic or affix?
According to WALS Feature 37A: Definite Articles, 198 languages have no definite or indefinite article, and 45 have no definite article but have indefinite articles. These number excludes languages ...
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What diagnostics distinguish demonstratives from definite articles?
Historically, definite articles are often related to demonstratives.
How might one characterize whether a word in a language is a definite article or a demonstrative?
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How do linguists determine whether a language has an indefinite article?
Given:
For those languages which have it, the indefinite article mostly if not always is derived from the numeral for "one".
Most languages have numbers but many lack articles.
How do linguists ...
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Why is the definite article in Balkan languages always called a suffix when it really seems to be part of the inflection?
The Scandinavian languages have a suffix definite article which is pretty straightforwardly tacked on to to the ends of nouns: -en, -et.
But in languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, Romanian, Bulgarian,...
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