The system of Articles in English

The article

Today the most disputable questions concerning the system of articles in Modern English are as follows: the identification of the article status in the hierarchy of language units, the number of articles, their categorial and pragmatic functions. There exist two basic approaches to the problem of the article status: some scholars consider the article a self- suffiction word which forms with the modified noun a synta ctic syntagma; others identify the article with the morpheme - like element which builds up with the nounal stem a specific morph.In recent works an opinion is expressed that in the hierarchy of language units the article occupies a peculiar place-the place intermediary between the word and the morpheme. As a result, the system of articles in English is described as one consisting of three articles-the definite article, the indefinite article and zero article, which correspondingly express the categorial functions of identification, relative generalization, and absolute generalization.

The idea of zero article takes its origin in the notion of 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 each their individual ending.