My Kingdom for an Article

There’s no avoiding the fact that someone hailing from a country whose language does not use articles is going to have difficulties with proper usage of articles (a, an, the) when learning English.  We English speaking folks use more articles a day than you’ll find mosquitoes at dusk in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters.  “Pass the persimmons, please. May I have a pickle? Hey, who ate my chips?”  On it goes.

There are basic rules, of course; and there are a gazillion exceptions. I am exaggerating slightly. There are a gazillion mosquitoes in Minnesota — I think I met each one of them last summer — and perhaps only trillions of exceptions dealing with articles.

Actually, maybe there are only a handful of exceptions, and those exceptions just occur a gazillion times.  I don’t know.

Let’s look at it a bit and see what sense we can make of it.  I can hear you English speaking people in the background getting excited about this.  “Mama, turn off the Lawrence Welk video … the nauseating nephew is going to talk about articles!  Yes, it’s true, Mama. We haven’t seen anything like this since the Guns of Navarone.”

Here are some guidelines / rules for starters.  These don’t cover every case, but someone learning English as a second language would do well to remember these.

Rule #1: If the noun is singular, countable, non-unique, has not been introduced, and does not refer to “all, everywhere” of that noun, then use “a” or “an” …

Rule #2: If the noun is plural or uncountable, or if it has been introduced, and it does not refer to “all, everywhere” of that noun, then use “the” …

Rule #3: If the noun is specific or unique, use “the” …

There are exceptions and there are special cases …

Examples?  Yes, examples abound.

Rule 1:  A cow is in the field.  We are introducing said bovine. It is singular and countable. It is not unique.

The cow is eating hay.  By now we know which cow we mean — the cow we introduced earlier — and at this point it is now a specific or particular or unique cow.  Rule 2 tells us this.

The cow belonging to Farmer Brown just ate my entire rhubarb patch.  This is one specific particular cow. It has not been introduced, but there is no question s to the identity of said cow.  It is Mr. Brown’s.  This is Rule 3, more or less.

Does this help?  I don’t know.  I’ve also put together a document with more examples and more description.  See the “Using Articles” document in the Grammar Help page.

Incidentally, if the cow ate my entire rhubarb patch, how long will it take the rhubarb to come back up?

Answer: about 20 minutes.