Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

5. The Category of Determination
The linguistic status of the article
The question is whether the article is a separate part of speech (i.e. a word)
or a word-morpheme. If we treat the article as a word, we shall have to admit that
English has only two articles - the and a/an. But if we treat the article as a wordmorpheme, we shall have three articles - the, a/an, ø.
B.Ilyish (1971:57) thinks that the choice between the two alternatives
remains a matter of opinion. The scholar gives a slight preference to the view that
the article is a word, but argues that “we cannot for the time being at least prove
that it is the only correct view of the English article”. M.Blokh (op. cit., 85)
regards the article as a special type of grammatical auxiliary. Linguists are only
agreed on the function of the article: the article is a determiner, or a restricter. The
linguistic status of the article reminds us of the status of shall/will in I shall/will go.
Both of the structures are still felt to be semantically related to their ‘parent’
structures: the numeral one and the demonstrative that (O.E. se) and the modals
shall and will, respectively.
The articles, according to some linguists, do not form a grammatical
category. The articles, they argue, do not belong to the same lexeme, and they do
not have meaning common to them: a/an has the meaning of oneness, not found in
the, which has a demonstrative meaning.
If we treat the article as a morpheme, then we shall have to set up a
grammatical category in the noun, the category of determination. This category
will have to have all the characteristic features of a grammatical category: common
meaning + distinctive meaning. So what is common to a room and the room? Both
nouns are restricted in meaning, i.e. they refer to an individual member of the class
‘room’. What makes them distinct is that a room has the feature [-Definite], while
the room has the feature [+Definite]. In this opposition the definite article is the
strong member and the indefinite article is the weak member.
The same analysis can be extended to abstract and concrete countable nouns,
e.g. courage: a courage vs. the courage.
Consider: He has a courage equaled by few of his contemporaries.
vs. She would never have the courage to defy him.
In contrast to countables, restricted uncountables are used with two
indefinite articles: a/an and zero. The role of the indefinite article is to individuate
a subamount of the entity which is presented here as an aspect (type, sort) of the
entity.
Consider also: Jim has a good knowledge of Greek, where a denotes a
subamount of knowledge,
Jim’s knowledge of Greek.
A certain difficulty arises when we analyze such sentences as The horse is
an animal and I see a horse. Do these nouns also form the opposemes of the
category of determination? We think that they do not: the horse is a subclass of the
animal class; a horse is also restricted - it denotes an individual member of the
horse subclass.
Cf. The horse is an animal. vs. A horse is an animal.
Unlike the nouns in the above examples, the nouns here exhibit
determination at the same level: both the horse and a horse express a subclass of
the animal class.