The number and meaning of articles. (The problem of the category of article determination)

The problem of English articles is a long debated question. Today the most disputable questions are the following:

- the status of the article in the hierarchy of language units;

- the number of articles and

- its categorical and pragmatic functions.

There exist two basic approaches to the problem of the article status: some scholars consider the article a self-sufficient word which forms with the modified noun a syntactic syntagma; others identify the article with the morpheme-like element which builds up with the nounal stem an analytical form.

In recent works on the problem of article determination of English nouns, very often an opinion is expressed that the article occupies a peculiar place - the place intermediary between the word and the morpheme, the so-called word-morpheme. Opposite to this point of view, many scholars consider that the article cannot be treated as a word-morpheme. Its position can be occupied by other words: demonstrative and possessive pronouns, numerals, nouns in the possessive case etc. Words which have distribution similar to the article are called determiners. The role of a determiner is to specify the range of reference to the noun by making it definite or indefinite. Moreover, the article plays an important role in structuring information. It is one of the means of distinguishing between facts already known – the theme, and new information – the rheme. The definite article is the marker of the theme and the indefinite article is the marker of the rheme, e.g. There is a book on the table. The book is on the table.

Obviously, there are only two material articles: the definite (the) and the indefinite (a/an). However, many nouns are used without any articles. Now the question arises how the absence of the article is to be treated:. The older grammatical tradition described it as the “omition of the article”, which is obviously inadequate, since there is not the slightest reason to believe that the article in such cases is simply omitted.

Another view is that we should describe this as the absence of the article. The third view is that the very absence of the article is a special kind of article, which is termed “zero article”.

The idea of a zero article takes its origin in the notion of a zero morpheme, which has been applied to certain forms in inflected languages, - namely to forms having no ending and differing by this very absence from other forms of the same word which have their individual endings. E.g. the Russian word “pyk” means the plural of the word “pyka” in the genetive case.

The notion of zero morpheme may also be applied in English, e.g. to the singular form of nouns as distinct from the plural form with the inflexion ”s” (room-rooms). To support this theory we must prove that the article is a semi-bound morpheme. In this case the idea of a zero article would make sense. The scholars supporting this idea give examples from other languages where definiteness / indefiniteness is expressed by suffixes (Bulgarian: момче – момче-то) and the possibility of the indefinite article appear as part of a word (another).

If we understand the article as a word, a unit of the English vocabulary, the idea of a zero word seems rather silly. Those who support the idea of a meaningful absence of the article as a word try to prove their point of view giving as an example the Russian sentence “ он здоров” as opposed to “он был (будет) здоров”, where the absence of the verb is a marker of the present tense.