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Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).
Metalinguistics isn't really the place for people to jump onto and use as the base to improve their language understanding. A lot of it is exceedingly jargon and thus completely inaccessible.
I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article.
For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best online reference I found: https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/d...
Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).
I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best on…
The existing linguistic models aren't meant for comprehension but rather for identification. I believe this is why so many of us still misuse "the" grossly.
Let's not jump on what is an "article" when explaining to e or just about any student, especially those who are trying to learn English! :)
I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best on…
Things like this and the countless typos I see every day make me question what on earth people are taught in school over there if not how to read and right (ha!).
It's not like I had a fancy education or anything, I grew up in a mostly rural part of Europe with a (still today) shitty economy.
Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification. The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.
Reading this, I have no idea if you're saying it because you know how modern syntactic theories work and how they're developed or if you're just saying it because you thought it sounded good. Don't leave us hanging!
But on simple inspection, the idea that a word can fit into a single category is obviously wrong. So to generalize the idea, you have to assume that a word can fit into multiple categories.
Biology is undergoing a similar transformation from simple "this animal looks kinda like this one" to genomics classification, which is revolutionizing the tree of living things used by biologists to organize living things.
There's not really any reason why words, a biological artifact, have been correctly classified all along. Hell! A copy-editor neighbor and I have minor quarrels over the capitalization of college subject names.
Trees are a specialization of graphs, and they're usually wrong. Just assume graphs to start with and your data will organize much better, even if the properties of the organizational metaphor aren't quite as nice.
I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best on…
And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification. So unless someone goes Archeresque and says "I saw the movie -- in which I of course mean 'the' to be an adjective", there's no sense in which that mistake is common either.
With that said, I think there is a substantive, common misuse of "the", but it's not what the article describes. Rather, it's when people say eg "I went to the store", when the speaker and listener don't have a common reference point that would justify "definiteness". I've always felt these should be "a store", since there are so many they could be referring to. (It's fine when there really is only one store they could be referring to.)
I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best on…
So was I, and I'm not even a native speaker. Things like this and the countless typos I see every day make me question what on earth people are taught in school over there if not how to read and right (ha!). It's not like I had a fancy education or anything, I grew up in a mostly rural part of Europe with a (still today) shitty economy.