scholarly journals An Analysis of Korean English Learners’ Acquisition of the Definite Article Co-occurring with Proper Nouns

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 245-266
Author(s):  
Choi, Jeong-A ◽  
Yae-Sheik Lee
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Proper Nouns

scholarly journals The Role of the Article in the Semantic Interpretation of the Antecedent in Attributive Clauses

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2 (11)) ◽  
pp. 68-73
Author(s):  
Nune Hayrapetyan
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
Proper Nouns

The role of the article in all grammar structures leaves no doubt. Attributive clauses prove no exception. Here, the article used with the antecedent contributes to the distinction of the attributive clause. Attributive clauses can be divisible and non-divisible. The antecedent of the latter is closely connected to the thematic continuation which acts as its characterization and does not need any restriction in the use of the article, i.e. both definite and indefinite article may be used here. Unlike non-divisible sentences, the antecedent in divisible attributive clauses is not strongly bound with its subordinate continuation since the latter contains additional information only. The semantic emphasis of the antecedent requires the use of only the definite article which can be used in zero category as an antecedent used in the presence of proper nouns.

The Problem of the Missing Article in the Use of ‘God’

1994 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Rien Op Den Brouw
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Definite Description ◽  
Prepositional Phrase ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Third Place ◽  
The Third ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Christian Discourse

This article is concerned with the use of ‘God’ in Judaeo-Christian discourse. The debate over ‘God’ has mainly centred on the puzzling issue of whether ‘God’ is a proper name with no descriptive connotation at all or whether it is a descriptive term with unique reference. In my view four things have to be taken into account in analysing the use of this term. In the first place, the term ‘God’ is a speech or communication phenomenon. Any treatment of this term should therefore consider the intentions, purposes, beliefs that a speaker has in using this word. In the second place, in Christian theistic discourse this term occurs both with and without modification. ‘The God of Israel’ is an example of ‘God’ with modification. It can be analysed as a noun phrase in which ‘God’ fulfils the function of HEAD, ‘the’ is a definite article filling the DETERMINER slot, and ‘of Israel’ is a prepositional phrase functioning as POSTMODIFIER. The use of only the term ‘God’ is an example without modification. In the third place, when Christians use ‘God’, either with or without modification, they use it to refer to, to describe or address one particular being. In the fourth place, when they use ‘God’ without modification, they do not use this term with an (in-) definite article. In this article three accounts of the term ‘God’ will be discussed: the proper name analysis, the definite description analysis, and the title-phrase analysis. Grammatically speaking, among the defenders of any of these analyses there is an agreed consensus on the classification of ‘God’ as a noun, but there is a disagreement about whether ‘God’ belongs to the category of proper nouns or to that of common nouns. Those adopting one of the last two analyses assume that ‘God’ is a common noun. This article presents an inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three analyses. In brief, the question we are seeking to answer is the following: what kind of term is ‘God’ and what is a Christian saying when he says ‘God’?

Déterminants et noms de pays en français contemporain

Revue Romane ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Jean-Claude Anscombre ◽  
Danièle Flament
Keyword(s):  
Specific Activity ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Rigid Designators ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Noun Class ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This article deals with the particular function of feminine proper nouns as names of countries. Unlike masculine nouns, these often do not need the definite article: le président (de l’Italie/du Chili) vs la reine (du Danemark/de Suède), habiter (en France/au Danemark). Many explanations have been suggested: morphological ones (nouns ending in -e or beginning with a vowel), lexical ones (archaisms) or semantics ones (the presence/absence of a definite article conveying different sorts of locative meanings). None of these are completely satisfactory, however. In fact, proper nouns as names of countries may be considered as a sub-class of a locative noun-class which includes common nouns. These exhibit the same linguistic properties when their referent is unique: au ciel/en enfer, au printemps/en automne. Our assumption is that the en/dans opposition between activities and locations (être en prison/dans la prison) pervaded the en/à opposition. We shall establish that these constructions are phrases with a zero article and have semantic and syntactic properties associated with the meaning of specific activity. The consequence is that locative proper nouns cannot be considered as rigid designators. They have the same status as common nouns and can convey the persistent symbolic power of myths. This explains why the French say en juillet faucille au poignet, July being the harvest month, and why they speak of pêcheurs d’Islande not to refer to Islandic fishers but to the legend of cod-fishing in ancient times.

Gender-marked determiners help Dutch learners' word recognition when gender information itself does not

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARIEKE VAN HEUGTEN ◽  
ELIZABETH K. JOHNSON
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Partial Knowledge ◽  
Preferential Looking ◽  
Gender Information ◽  
Article System

ABSTRACTDutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use articles during sentence comprehension in a fashion comparable to similarly aged English learners. That is, Dutch learners' sentence processing was impaired when a nonsense (se) as opposed to real article (de, het) preceded target words, much like English learners' sentence processing is disrupted by the use of a nonsense article. At the same time, however, gender cues did not help Dutch learners recognize target nouns more efficiently, indicating that gender has yet to be acquired. Thus, although Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 have not mastered all aspects of their language's article system, they nonetheless use their partial knowledge of articles during speech processing.

scholarly journals Categories of definiteness in Classical Armenian

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelika Müth
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
Definite Articles

In this paper, the use of the definite article in semantic and pragmatic categories in the Greek and Classical Armenian New Testament translation is compared. Greek and Classical Armenian agree in their use of the definite article only in NPs determined by contrastive attributes. In all other categories the systems of both languages differ. Generally, Armenian avoids the definite article with proper nouns and nouns with unique reference, while definite articles with proper names in Greek are common (with the exception of sacred or especially “respected” persons such as prophets). If the definite article is present in Greek, it is often motivated by pragmatic factors (e.g. re-topicalization, etc.). There is no clear evidence in Armenian for the use of the definite article as a marker of generic reference, nor for the use in NPs determined by superlative, comparative or ordinal attributes.

scholarly journals On Proper Names in German: An Analysis from the Cognitive Perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (28) ◽  
pp. 38-46
Author(s):  
Magdalena Zofia Majcher
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Cognitive Grammar ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
German Language ◽  
Proper Noun ◽  
Mountain Ranges ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun ◽  
Grammar Analysis

The aim of this paper is a cognitive grammar analysis of noun phrases in German which contain a proper noun. It is common for proper nouns in German, like first names, surnames, the names of cities and countries, to occur without an article. They can, however, also occur with the definite article, the demonstrative pronoun or with the indefinite article. There are also proper nouns in German, such as the names of rivers, mountain ranges, and some countries, which—according to many grammars—obligatorily occur with the definite article. However, it may happen that even those occur without an article. Whether there is an article before a proper noun or not is regarded as a grammatical phenomenon, without acknowledging its semantic aspects. The latter are only considered in a very few cases. A cognitive grammar analysis makes it possible to look at the abovementioned phenomena from the semanticconceptual perspective, thus ensuring wider opportunities to explain and describe them. According to cognitive grammar, every use of any element should have a semantic-conceptual motivation. The cognitive grammar analysis of German noun phrases containing a proper noun carried out in this article allows us to conclude that the use of articles in the German language is in most cases determined by the speaker’s intention. The analysis in this paper includes a description of noun phrases containing proper nouns selected from the German magazine Der Spiegel.

scholarly journals ‘Nicanor y la Violeta’: Un análisis crítico del uso del artículo definido ante nombres propios masculinos y femeninos

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-235
Author(s):  
Leonardo Aliaga Rovira ◽  
Patricia Avilés Retamal ◽  
Domingo Román Montes de Oca ◽  
María José Serrano Insunza ◽  
Camila Colicheo Cabrera ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Definite Article ◽  
Proper Noun ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Social Prejudice

This article studies the structure “definite article + proper noun anthroponym” and its distribution of use in cases of female and male anthroponyms. It is assumed that this structure is more frequent when the anthroponym is female (“la Violeta” and not “el Nicanor”). Since the presence of the article is expletive before proper nouns and, on the contrary, the use of this determinant or another is required, in specific syntactic positions, before common nouns, the appearance of the definite article preceding the feminine anthroponym could be a mark of social prejudice towards woman. To corroborate this hypothesis, the phenomenon studied was tracked in chilean written press texts, in order to analysing its appearance and frequency of use in cases of feminine and masculine anthroponyms.

THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH DEFINITE NOUN PHRASES BY MANDARIN CHINESE SPEAKERS

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (04) ◽  
pp. 881-896
Author(s):  
Shuo Feng
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
English Learners ◽  
First Language ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Feature Reassembly ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Pragmatic Knowledge

AbstractBy replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article the: [+definite, +/-anaphoric]. In the current study, the participants were 28 advanced and 25 intermediate L1-Chinese L2-English learners and the native control data were from Cho. The results from an acceptability judgment task revealed that intermediate Chinese speakers, unlike advanced speakers, had difficulties in the nonanaphoric definite condition where, without a potential antecedent, definiteness is established through pragmatic knowledge and acquisition of nonanaphoric definiteness essentially takes place at the semantics-pragmatics interface. The findings of this article suggest that accommodating presuppositions at the semantics-pragmatics interface is challenging to L2 learners, even when feature reassembly is not required.

scholarly journals Definite article (omission) in British, Maltese, and other Englishes

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-303
Author(s):  
Manfred Krug ◽  
Christopher Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Definite Article ◽  
British English ◽  
Ordinal Numbers ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
Text Corpora

Abstract This article investigates factors that underlie the discrepancies in article omission between Maltese English (MaltE) and British English (BrE), with reference to further ENL, ESL and EFL varieties. We investigate seasons of the year, ordinal numbers, languages, proper nouns, titles, institutions and common nouns. Our sources include text corpora, and web and questionnaire-based data. Our key proposal is that MaltE has innovated a rule that the definite article may be omitted when the uniqueness or identifiability of a referent is salient in context. Furthermore, MaltE avoids the definite article commonly when the referent is generic rather than definite. The resulting MaltE system is regulated according to fewer parameters than in BrE, but more consistently.

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