What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
itre.cis.upenn.edu
itre.cis.upenn.edu
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...
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! :)
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.
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.)
The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the?
The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe!
In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney.
Edit: couldn't decide on the number of shoes so I went for both singular and plural :(
> The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the?
* Worstest? Most least?
> The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe!
* The smallest shoe confused her. How could it be so smallest?!
> In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney.
* Outside the wooden red house was a brick grey ancient barn.
The last one is especially interesting-- if you're a native English speaker, I'll wager that "brick ancient barn" sounds nearly as ungrammatical as "brick the barn", but it's a lot harder to explain why.
Edit: Some more decisive examples of that from replies, since some have rightly pointed out that "brick ancient barn" is semi-acceptable in context:
* "grain lone silo", "fish dry pond", "beef tasty stew", "laptop lost bag", "horse leather saddle" / "leather horse saddle" (both grammatical, but different meanings)
Edit: this is in reference to "brick the barn". Grammatical if nonsensical. "Brick ancient barn" is of course weird and wrong unless you really want to emphasize that this is a brick ancient barn and not a wooden ancient barn like all the other ancient barns. The normal adjective order can be deviated from for emphasis. My point was that that didn't work when "the" was one of the "adjectives".
(I've been trying to fall asleep for hours so I make mistakes left and right -- I apologize for not being clear about the word list I referred to.)
--
"Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns. It's just that English refuses to accept that it's a Germanic language and instead puts on airs. Honest languages would of course never dream of inserting pretentious spaces between the constituent parts.
I actually thought of "stone chimney" as a compound noun instead of adjective + noun when I wrote it, precisely because I wanted to mock that and really hammer home the point. Unfortunately, the two look the same in English (but not in Danish) -- and I was tired -- so I didn't catch it and replace it with a better example.
Eeeh, not exactly in English. English does make some distinction between fully compounded words and noun phrases, especially in rules of production. In a newer phrase like "wind farm", you can swap in more or less any noun you like, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense: "mud farm", "rock farm", "hair farm"... there's some rule like "substance + farm = a farm that produces that substance". With a word like "bedroom", you can get "bathroom", but not so much "deskroom"; there's no general rule like "furniture + room = room where that furniture is found". The space (in cases where it's pronounced) is kinda your hint there.
Anyway... I still don't believe in grammar, but y'all have mounted a spirited defense of the traditional analysis. I'm sorry I tried to say everything's an adjective :)
Most people would be comfortable saying "ancient grey brick barn".
When we're young we absorb language the way we experience it, in an informal and cultural way. I think in any attempt to categorize aspects of language this basic character has to be respected (which it is in linguistics, being fundamental to it, but which it isn't in e.g. English canon).
Accepting that one's language is actually a messy evolution-convolution of ancient languages is easier for some than others. :D
A "leather horse saddle" and a "horse leather saddle" are very different things, and no native English speaker would mix them up. You know which they mean.
"Mixed-breed puppy" is, to me, not such a clear case ("breed" is clearly originally a noun, but maybe this use is common enough to have converted). But you don't need to use spurious examples -- in another comment, you provided a very genuine one: "red" and "wooden" are both clearly adjectives, and their ordering cannot vary. This is a well-known example of a somewhat-but-not-entirely mysterious phenomenon in linguistics.
Here's a nice recent writeup of what I think is a related phenomenon: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/cutthroat-compoun... . This one consists of the observation that words like "kickass" and "pickpocket" are suppressed (not illegal, but suppressed) in English because they conflict with our tendency toward right-headedness (that is, in any English compound, the "essence" of the compound should be found at the right end). Instead, we incline more to compounds like "bank robber" or "nose-thumbing" ("engage in a bit of nose-thumbing"). Someone else in this thread already mentioned that they see adjective ordering as a question of which adjectives are more essential to the whole.
My problem with your comments here is that you're making arguments based on obviously spurious tests unrelated to the claims you then try to follow (um, lead) with. It's analogous to saying "We need to stop celebrating Thanksgiving by eating turkey. Turkey perpetrated the Armenian genocide, genocide is bad and should be stopped, QED". Stick to honest examples, and you'll find the problems you're talking about are rather muted. Don't let your feeling that the problems are large, and you therefore need extremely malformed examples, lead you into choosing examples that are extremely malformed because they exhibit a completely different problem.
To the extent I'm arguing something non-disingenuous, it's just that language is best analyzed with a bit of a fuzzy lens, and words don't fit into neat boxes.
Take your claim that "hiking" is a noun: To me, it analyzes as an inflection of a verb ("hike") that can be used to indicate an action ("I was hiking"), the performer or target of an action ("I don't hate hiking, hiking hates me") or as a modifier for something else ("those crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking boots").
On what basis do you say that it is a noun? Specifically, when looking at the list "crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking", with modifiers lined up in order of significance, what about the word "hiking" jumps out at you as plainly different in use or meaning? "The boots aren't hiking, they're for hiking"? Clearly-- in this phrase, the word "hiking" means the boots are for hiking!
To me, the most intellectually honest thing is to see compound nouns as a sort of epicycle-style theory to explain why words in our non-modifier class are actually used as modifiers all the time, just according to a subtly different set of rules than applies to the modifier class. I don't think there's anything really wrong with that, since it explains things well enough and we might never have something like universal gravitation to set the record straight.
What I'm saying is, I don't think I have a problem.
Except, of course, when the "rules of grammar" are used as a proxy to cast minorities and lower-class people as unintelligent. That, I have a problem with, and it's quite a popular pastime in the English-speaking world. That's why I think it's important to think scientifically about the extent to which grammar is, and is not, a real thing. (Including, sometimes, hypothesizing things that don't make sense, just to see what happens.)
I wouldn't say you're wrong about this. However, I'd be much more willing to defend the idea that, as it appears here, "hiking" is a one-word noun phrase containing a verb form (and that compound nouns are formed NP-NP, not N-N). Traditional grammar has gifted us with a rich vocabulary of specialized terms for specialized syntactic functions, and the traditional term for a verb form which functions as a noun is "gerund". (Um, technically, infinitive forms can also function as nouns.)
I'll pause here to defend myself from an argument you haven't made: there are people who will say that "beef" in "beef stew" is an adjective simply because it modifies a noun. They're wrong. I say that a gerund really is a verb form acting as a noun. The difference is that I'm saying that gerunds can appear in basically all syntactic contexts that permit noun phrases, so the definition I'm using is syntactic (as appropriate for a syntactic term of art like "noun") rather than semantic. I'm not saying gerunds are nouns because they refer to objects -- I'm saying they're nouns because they can be the subjects of verbs (and otherwise appear where nouns appear). To me, the best analysis is just that noun phrases can be constructed from verb forms. Linking back to the subject at hand, I'd agree that "hiking", the word, is not a noun in the same way that "iron", the word, is one, but I am saying that this "hiking", as used in context, is just as much of a noun phrase as "this rusted iron" is.
> Specifically, when looking at the list "crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking", with modifiers lined up in order of significance, what about the word "hiking" jumps out at you as plainly different in use or meaning?
In all honesty, what jumps out at me is that all of the others are descriptions, while it would be odd to use "hiking" that way. For example, in a certain style of speech, you could see something like this:
Get out and take your crummy, old, worn-out, leather, gusseted, boots with you.
But it's completely impossible for the "hiking" of "hiking boots" to be delimited by commas (in speech, emphatic pauses) that way. If you did it, the meaning of "hiking" would change -- it would mean that the boots were out on a hike. This demonstrates that "hiking" is not a descriptor for "boots" -- rather, "hiking boots" is a single unit. (Yes, with internal structure.)
> To me, the most intellectually honest thing is to see compound nouns as a sort of epicycle-style theory to explain why words in our non-modifier class are actually used as modifiers all the time, just according to a subtly different set of rules than applies to the modifier class.
English is way more liberal with modifiers than that.
He gave me his I'm-going-to-kill-you look.
native speakers of english will find that "red wooden house" is favored over "wooden red house", the same way the "big red dog" is favored over "red big dog".
There's an ordering to adjectives that has something to do with how important the adjective is to the identity or distinctiveness of the modified object.
It's still a judgment call whether they properly belong in different categories, and situation-dependent, so it's really not something that merits the "point and laugh" treatment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Topic.2C_them...
many
every
my
some
his
this
I disagree...
> There are many other words in the same category:
All these example words add semantic meaning to the noun phrase, and a primary sub-category for their use is whether the noun is countable (e.g. cat) or uncountable (e.g. salt):
cats VS salt
a cat/any cat, some cats, all cats/every cat VS some salt, all salt
no cats, one cat, two cats, ... VS no salt, some salt
few cats, many cats VS little salt, much salt
my cat/s, our cat/s, your cat/s VS my salt, our salt, your salt
his cat/s, her cat/s, its cat/s, their cat/s VS his salt, her salt, its salt, their salt
this cat, that cat, these cats, those cats VS this salt, that salt
> Note that "my", "his", and "this" also mark definiteness on the noun phrase.
In those cases the demonstrative is adding semantic information to the noun, whether possession ("my", "his") or location ("this").
If we split "A cat sitting on the rug meows." into the 2 sentences "A cat is sitting on the rug. The cat meows.", the only function of the "the" in the second sentence is to provide a cohesive link to something in the first sentence. Similarly, "Some salt stored in the shaker spills." can be split into "Some salt is stored in the shaker. The salt spills." This makes "the" solely a cohesive device, independent of the semantics and in the domain of thematics. So "a" and "the" are used orthogonally, each in different ways of analyzing an utterance.
There's some guy out on the sidewalk erasing the chalk art.
Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements:
Your house is big.
It's raining outside.
Not sure how that relates to what I'm saying about "the".
A minor note: the "is" in "Your house is big" is non-contractable, whereas in "It's raining outside" the "is" contracts, so they're really 2 different words.
It's big.
EDIT:
I want to also bring two more examples of "the" in English to your attention. The first was recently produced by me:
> It's a famous result that the people who believe premarital sex is wrong account for fairly little of the premarital sex.
"The premarital sex" has basically the same semantics as "all premarital sex", and the use of "the" is required for that effect.
Here's the second:
> In considering India it must always be borne in mind that here was the original seat of the Aryan civilization and that, though the Hindoo is as dark as many of the American negroes, he is of Aryan stock like ourselves.
( http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27233/27233-h/27233-h.htm )
Again, "the Hindoo" uses a "the" that cannot be interpreted anaphorically, and the noun phrase is in fact not linked to anything prior. It appears in the context already marked for definiteness.
Your dog's big.
I said "the" is solely a cohesive device, independent of the semantics and in the domain of thematics, so "a" and "the" are used orthogonally. I also said if "part of speech" is defined as being in the grammatical structure of languages, then "the" doesn't have a part of speech -- I was reinforcing the first point I made. All your arguments have only made some point which is tangential to what you've replied to. Linguists don't use the term "part of speech" anymore anyway, they instead define "word class".
As for "the premarital sex" and "the Hindoo", you're creating an implied prior context when you use "the" instead of a regular form such as "all premarital sex" and "Hindoos". The "the" overlays onto the "all", "-s", or "a" to change the grammatical structure.
As to "your house is big": you said
> Looks like "your house is big" doesn't contract because the voiced "is" becomes unvoiced "-s" when contracting
This isn't true. Just look at the followup I gave, "your dog's big". By analogy to the verb suffixes -s and -ed (and the clitic genitive particle 's), we can see that voiced "is" /ɪz/ would contract to [əz] (still a full syllable), not [s], when following "house". As it's pronounced that way anyway, investigation is pretty futile.
The semantic "a" and thematic "the" don't interfere with each other, and can be taught separately. Perhaps you're thinking of their influence on the end grammar of the sentence.
> They participate in the grammatical structure of English in exactly the same way.
Not exactly the same. As I said above, the "the" overlays onto the grammatical structure after the "a" does.
> If you want a more focused reply, I need you to explain what you're talking about at greater length.
What makes you think I want your replies? I never replied to you initially.
Similarly 'I am going to shop' and 'I am going to the shop'.
Anyway, back to my poorly made point: I think that the example sentences show that even 'educated' British and American English are in many ways quite distinct dialects.
"Dog kicked ball" is ungrammatical whereas "the dog kicked a ball" is fine.
"Red dog kicked blue ball" is plausible only when "red dog" and "blue ball" are considered proper nouns (meaning the phrase "red dog" denotes a particular dog in the context).
Proper nouns like George Washington don't need a determiner.
Nature abhors a vacuum. One giant leap for mankind.
The rules for when articles can/must be left out are quite complicated :(
> Proper nouns like George Washington don't need a determiner.
"Nature" is a proper noun (there is, after all, only one.).
"One" is a determiner. "mankind" is a proper noun.
Absolutely agree that, in colloquial English, the rules for when articles / determiners (and any other part of speech really) can be elided are complicated. I quite routinely ask people "time is it", leaving out the "what".
I chose the "One giant leap for mankind" example not because I didn't know that "one" is a determiner but because "one" and "a[n]" usually can't substitute for each other (with the usual complicated rules). Danish doesn't have this distinction at all, using the same two words for the cardinal number and the indeterminate article.
I guess my point really was that determiners are hard -- and calling them adjectives doesn't help.
Mass nouns and plural nouns don't necessarily need determiners, depending on how you're using them.
I was always dissatisfied with definite article. It seems like a tautology.
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.
I think we agree but are labeling it different. I meant the "listener knowledge" broadly -- you seem to agree that using "the" requires some understanding on the listener's part that there's something that narrows down which store and makes it definite, even if it's not enough for them to pick it out. In this case, that the listener somehow knows that there is some store you must be thinking of.
But the "store" usage still seems to break this: people use it even there's no reason for the list to believe the speaker is thusly restricted!
The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.
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.
But I don't have any real reason to claim that they don't work. Syntactic theories aim to explain why particular sentences are grammatical or ungrammatical (in the judgments of native speakers). If you can accurately do that, then yes, you've put each word into one category (as far as making up grammatical sentences). So to say the kind of thing you're saying, you'd have to explain why the current research programs in syntax are misguided.
Ask a simple group of 5 linguists and they all will give you different answers. This literally happened in a workshop we gave at a college months ago. Quite funny.
While working on grmmr (green-bridge.org) we recognized that so many of us are densely confused when it comes to these metalinguistics. So we just stopped using knives that dissected (metalinguistics) words into words and went for friendlier marker (symbols and colors).
We need to be reminded that a lot of it is just pretend and educated guesses, no absolutes. Markers seem to work better here than knives do when teaching and categorizing language grammar.
Though I'd still argue linguistics has it worse. You don't really expect people in educated society to get into heated arguments with the 10-day weather forecast, or jump in to correct your "biology mistakes" while you're eating...
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.
Interesting point and I agree. Why are we identifying metalinguistics with words anyway? Why not just use symbols so we can actually compare them across languages?
Is the tradition so inherently rigid and stuck to the written/spoken languages - rather than moving beyond words and use a system of symbols?
The tradition obsufcates the universality of grammar and semantics by adding words atop words rather than simple symbolism.
Doesn't this make internalization harder? You don't teach math just by numbers but also with symbols and real-world references.
As for internalization and understanding what and where 'the' belongs...There has been astounding success in identification and understanding when metalinguistics is entirely removed and replaced with simple symbols like grmmr (http://green-bridge.org). I've seen results upfront and it seems a non-word approach eases and solidifies linguistic understanding in ways far more profoundly than metalinguistics ever can. Teachers and students alike have said this system has taken away all the cloud of uncertainty in language grammar and semantics.
If you are a linguist and you are interested in helping grmmr become a standard in the studies of metalinguistics, please do let me know! I'm the design partner of the company. We are eager to open source this knowledge into a simple but reliable notation.
This system has been in use for over 20 years in classrooms, colleges, and adult education programs. It has been redesigned from bottom up in order to be as accessible and consistent as you would expect from a grammar categorizing system.
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.
Closed-class words are treated like keywords in programming languages. The list seldom changes, and it's necessary to know the closed-class words, but not the open-class words, to parse a sentence. (At least in formal English.) While there are taxonomies of the closed-class words, modern thinking is that they're all handled as special cases.
(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 captures reality, but I'd love to hear about such.)
So the class of determiners is probably closed, but the class of determiner phrases is not (because phrases like "fewer than five of", "fewer than six of", etc are "generative" i.e. you can generate as many as you like).
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. Perhaps parliamentary procedure buffs, who (say) care about 2/3s majority just as much as simple majority ("most"), come up with "tooths" meaning "at least two thirds of", and it becomes accepted as jargon within that community. Could totally see it happening. In fact, if anybody knows of any such instances I'd love to hear about them.
And there are newer theories that are much more compatible with a probabilistic / data-oriented outlook, even combining this with the model-theoretic grammar: http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/lfg-dop/
People into semantics seem to like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar which I never learnt much about. Oh and there's also the Meaning-Text theory, Relational Grammar and various dependency-based frameworks, Optimality Theory applied to syntax, … it goes on and on :)
"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!"
My eighth grade English class was innovative in that it used a textbook based on phrase-structure transformational grammar to teach me a lot of my English grammar. I would be glad to see books like that (modernized based on further linguistic research since the 1960s when the book was published) used in classrooms today. The "traditional" grammar poorly taught in the United States is based on an Indo-European grammatical tradition that is not completely lousy for teaching native speakers of Latin how to read and write Greek, but it has never been well suited for teaching analysis of English to native speakers or foreign-language learners of English. English has many grammatical features that are poorly described by the grammatical traditional of school lessons in English-speaking countries.
For further reading on this point, see Steven Pinker's excellent new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.[1] For a better than average treatment of this point on Wikipedia, see the article "English language,"[2] which was updated to "good article" status during the most recent Wikipedia Core Contest, and is actually pretty decent for a Wikipedia article, with lots of references to good-quality reference books about the English language.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/06...
Can someone elaborate on that?
Go public school system!