>(If you have pronoun as a part of speech, that would be a very clever answer, but you're going to have a lot of trouble convincing non-linguists of that.)
Can someone elaborate on that?
What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
71–80 of 99 posts
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. 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…
Other modern languages such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and others get by perfectly well without the qualifiers 'the' and 'a', which according to Wikipedia are the first and sixth most frequently used words in English respectively, so they don't seem cognitively compulsory for understanding. And juxtaposing British English with US English 'the' has throw-away status in assertions such as 'I am going to university'…
In British English your two university examples mean different things. 'I am going to university' means that I will study at some unspecified university, but 'I am going to the university' means I am going to travel to a specific, presumably already mentioned, university or even more likely to the nearest one. The first would be said by a student while the second by someone who works at a university (lecturer, secretary, cleaner, jobbing builder, etc.).
Similarly 'I am going to shop' and 'I am going to the shop'.
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#73I'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…
As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. 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…
I'm so glad to have discovered that the OED classes it as an adjective.
I was always dissatisfied with definite article. It seems like a tautology.
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#74Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#75I'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…
Who even needs middle-school grammar when you can have Monty Python? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogPZ5CY9KoM
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#76I'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…
As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. 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…
Generally speaking, "the" needs to be interpretted from the speaker's point of view. Saying "I went to a store" implies that I had a wide choice of stores. Saying "I went to the store" implies that I didn't choose which store I went to. It's the store that I usually go to when I buy things. It doesn't necessarily mean that the listener knows which store I went to, or that there is only one store.
Conversely, if I say, "I ate the peach" then I am inferring that there was something special about the peach which would imply that you should know about it. Why is it different from a store? Because I don't routinely eat the same peach every day/week. I don't have a default choice.
Yes, I taught English as a foreign language for 5 years. It's interesting that native English speakers who speak perfectly don't actually know how this works. Even after the amount of thought and study I put into it, I'm willing to bet that I don't have it 100% right.
If anybody is studying a second language, this is a big hint about what you should not be studying ;-) You can get some things almost completely wrong and it will be fine most of the time. Eventually, after you are corrected 10,000 times you will use it without thinking about it.
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#77This was resolved years ago in the linguistics community. There are open-class words, which in English are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. New open-class words can easily be added to the language. There are closed-class words, about a hundred of them, although opinions differ on this.[1] Some lists have "the" as a closed-class word, others have it as an an adverb. Closed-class words are treated like keywords i…
I would argue that "the" is a determiner, and the class of determiners is mostly closed. A determiner is the root of a determiner phrase. A determiner phrase can consist of only the root, like "the" or "a", but it can also be more complex like "every other", "uncomfortably few", or "90% of". (This is all from chomsky's x-bar theory [0], which dates back to the 60s. I'm not aware of another model of syntax that better…
> I could absolutely conceive of a situation where a certain determiner phrase gets used so much in a community that an abbreviation becomes accepted as a new determiner... In fact, if anybody knows of any such instances I'd love to hear about them.
"Hella" in bay area (especially east bay) dialect (more common c. 2000, but you can still hear it today): "There were hella people at the party!"
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good observations. It's also interesting to look back 2K years at the kingpin Eurasian languages for evidence of definite/indefinite articles. From right to left, ancient Chinese (probably) lacked the qualifier but was exposed to its existence via the silk road (which used the lingua franca Aramaic which had them) and also through exposure to the Greek Buddhist colonies in North India (ancient Greek had a definite ar…
In Homeric Greek, the definite article is more of a demonstrative adjective, isn't it, more "that man" rather than "the man"? And Greek hung on as the language of administration in the eastern part of the empire.
True. The Wikipedia page on 'Article (grammar)' brings up the same points. Meanwhile, back in Greece,the European Union, and the OXIclean vote (a stain remover product in the US :) ...
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#79Just because you can point to "the" and identify it as a complement or article doesn't mean you understand it and you're doing linguistics!
See this recent submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769 [Richard Feynman on the difference between being able to name something, and understanding.]
Native-English-speaking children already know how to correctly use articles, without requiring a theory of what they are.
Teaching English learners that "the" is an article will not by itself result in correct use; they will be able to name it as an article, yet continue to use it in ways perceived as incorrect by native speakers, and do so for decades to come, possibly.
It doesn't matter whether we "the" a determiner, or whether we call it a blunx. If we don't know where in a sentence a particular English blunx must be used or else must be omitted, then we don't actually know what a blunx is! And if we don't know that, we probably don't even understand why certain words are classified together as blunxes and others are excluded from that category; we are just demonstrating rote memorization.
Without using the word "determiner" or "article", tell me where to use 'the', where to use 'a', and when not to use them.
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other modern languages such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and others get by perfectly well without the qualifiers 'the' and 'a', which according to Wikipedia are the first and sixth most frequently used words in English respectively, so they don't seem cognitively compulsory for understanding. And juxtaposing British English with US English 'the' has throw-away status in assertions such as 'I am going to university'…
In British English your two university examples mean different things. 'I am going to university' means that I will study at some unspecified university, but 'I am going to the university' means I am going to travel to a specific, presumably already mentioned, university or even more likely to the nearest one. The first would be said by a student while the second by someone who works at a university (lecturer, secret…
Written from the vantage point of a good RP education. Unfortunately in US 'going to shop' out of context would elicit the question 'where?' taking 'to shop' as an infinitive and not as an activity venue.