The role of articles in actual division of the sentence.

The door opened and the young man came in./The door opened and a young man came in.

In the 2^nd case we can see that the central point of the sentence is a young man, which is new (à the person who came in proved to be a young man). While in the 1^st sentence the central point is that he came in. The central point corresponds to the semantic predicate, or the RHEME.

à the indefinite article expresses what is new, and the definite article expresses what is known already, or at least what is not presented as new

Noun determiners. The article.

An article is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles can have various functions:

a definite article (English the) is used before singular and plural nouns that refer to a particular member of a group. (The cat on the mat is black.)

an indefinite article (English a, an) is used before singular nouns that refer to any member of a group. (A cat is a mammal).

a partitive article indicates an indefinite quantity of a mass noun; there is no partitive article in English, though the words some or any often have that function.

a zero article is the absence of an article (e.g. English indefinite plural), used in some languages in contrast with the presence of one. Linguists hypothesize the absence as a zero article based on the X-bar theory.

Не знайшли потрібну інформацію? Скористайтесь пошуком google:

Генерація сторінки за: 0.005 сек.