Ministry of Education and Science of UkraineNational Linguistic Universityof Germanic and Finno-Ugrian Philology
Papergrammar of the English language
«Theoretical and practical aspects of the article in Modern English»
2013
Міністерство освіти и науки України
Київський національний лінгвістичний університет
Кафедра германської и фіно-угорської філології
Курсова робота
з теоретичної граматики англійської мови
на тему:
«теоретичністю та практичний аспекти Вивчення артикля в сучасній англійській мові»
Київ 2013
Introduction
theme of course paper is «Theoretical and practical aspects of the article in Modern English». The topicality of course work is connected with contrоversial article usage in Modern English. The articles perform a discourse function, by indicating new and old information. And this function is realized in practice through certain articles usage. The problem of article determination has given rise to much controversy; there is much dispute about the status of the article itself and the status of its combination with the noun. The article is often defined as a unit whose main function is to actualize the concept of the referent in a particular text; in other words, the article correlates the notion of the referent with actual reality subjectively, as presented by the speaker (writer) .object of course paper is: indefinite meaning expressed by articles a/an and zero article, usage of the definite article the with examples being selected from the novel «Everything is illuminated» by Jonathan Safran Foer.aim of course paper is to investigate the linguistic status of the article in Modern English along with its main function of noun determiner providing main tendencies in article usage with examples from the novel «Everything is illuminated» .task of course paper is to show the articles applying tendencies based on their usages, most of which can not be fully underpinned by general rules.
1. The linguistic status of the article
question is: is the article a separate part of speech or a word morpheme? If we treat the article as a word, we shall have to admit that English has only two articles - the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an. But if we treat the article as a word-morpheme, we shall have three articles - the, a/an and the zero article?. B.Ilyish states that the choice between the two alternatives remains a matter of opi nion. The scholar gives a slight preference to the view that the article is a word, but argues that: «we can not for the time being at least prove that it is the only correct view of the English article». [12; 57] .Blokh regards the article as a special type of grammatical auxiliary: «The article itself is a special type of grammatical auxiliary» [1; 85] 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 (Old English s?) And the modals shall and will, respectively. The article s, according to some linguists, do not form a grammatical category. As is pointed out by B.Khaimovich and Rogovskaya: «the members of an opposeme must belong to the same lexeme and have identical meanings» [7; 214] 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. For this reason, they argue, a book and the book are not analytic structures .. Ylyish thinks that: «There seems to be nothing to prevent us from thinking that a room is an analytical form of the noun room ...» [12 ; 57] 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 and distinctive meaning. So what is common to a room and the room? Nouns are restricted in meaning, they refer to an individual member of the class room. What makes them distinct is that a room has the feature (-Defi...
