What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

47 点作者 synesso将近 10 年前

11 条评论

tedd4u将近 10 年前

I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all.I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article.For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best online reference I found: <a href="https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/determiners-and-quantifiers/definite-article" rel="nofollow">https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/d...</a>

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alricb将近 10 年前

These days, in Quebec, French (as a first language) is taught using a more-or-less linguistically correct approach, with articles called determiners, dividing sentences into groups and using transformations to understand interrogative sentences. In my days we used a more traditional system, and the time we spent doing grammar analysis was very tedious; we only approached the subject in secondary school. These days they are taught to analyse sentences in 3rd-4th grade and up.

bane将近 10 年前

Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification.The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.

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_ibu9将近 10 年前

Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).

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sethjgore将近 10 年前

"The deeper problem is the school tradition itself. It's a TRADITION, after all"Interesting point and I agree. Why are we identifying metalinguistics with words anyway? Why not just use symbols so we can actually compare them across languages?Is the tradition so inherently rigid and stuck to the written/spoken languages - rather than moving beyond words and use a system of symbols?The tradition obsufcates the universality of grammar and semantics by adding words atop words rather than simple symbolism.Doesn't this make internalization harder? You don't teach math just by numbers but also with symbols and real-world references.As for internalization and understanding what and where 'the' belongs...There has been astounding success in identification and understanding when metalinguistics is entirely removed and replaced with simple symbols like grmmr (<a href="http://green-bridge.org" rel="nofollow">http://green-bridge.org</a>). I've seen results upfront and it seems a non-word approach eases and solidifies linguistic understanding in ways far more profoundly than metalinguistics ever can. Teachers and students alike have said this system has taken away all the cloud of uncertainty in language grammar and semantics.If you are a linguist and you are interested in helping grmmr become a standard in the studies of metalinguistics, please do let me know! I'm the design partner of the company. We are eager to open source this knowledge into a simple but reliable notation.This system has been in use for over 20 years in classrooms, colleges, and adult education programs. It has been redesigned from bottom up in order to be as accessible and consistent as you would expect from a grammar categorizing system.

kazinator将近 10 年前

Just because you can point to "the" and identify it as a complement or article doesn't mean you understand it and you're doing linguistics!See this recent submission: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769</a> [Richard Feynman on the difference between being able to name something, and understanding.]Native-English-speaking children already know how to correctly use articles, without requiring a theory of what they are.Teaching English learners that "the" is an article will not by itself result in correct use; they will be able to name it as an article, yet continue to use it in ways perceived as incorrect by native speakers, and do so for decades to come, possibly.It doesn't matter whether we "the" a determiner, or whether we call it a blunx. If we don't know where in a sentence a particular English blunx must be used or else must be omitted, then we don't actually know what a blunx is! And if we don't know that, we probably don't even understand why certain words are classified together as blunxes and others are excluded from that category; we are just demonstrating rote memorization.Without using the word "determiner" or "article", tell me where to use 'the', where to use 'a', and when not to use them.

Animats将近 10 年前

This was resolved years ago in the linguistics community. There are open-class words, which in English are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. New open-class words can easily be added to the language. There are closed-class words, about a hundred of them, although opinions differ on this.[1] Some lists have "the" as a closed-class word, others have it as an an adverb.Closed-class words are treated like keywords in programming languages. The list seldom changes, and it's necessary to know the closed-class words, but not the open-class words, to parse a sentence. (At least in formal English.) While there are taxonomies of the closed-class words, modern thinking is that they're all handled as special cases.[1] <a href="https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/English_vocabulary_list" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/English_vocabulary_list</a>

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tokenadult将近 10 年前

The author of the submitted, um, article (blog post) didn't cover all the ground that could be covered on this issue, because it was an off-hand post. The previous comments here on Hacker News prompt me to bring up one more issue: even if we follow tradition and call "the" an "article" (as I was taught at some point in my schooling), we have the interesting situation that some languages, even in the Indo-European language family, have no expressed definite article at all. Latin didn't have one, and Russian doesn't have one. Definite reference in Latin, in Russian, and in many non-Indo-European languages (all the various Sinitic languages that are jointly called "Chinese" immediately come to mind) is indicated by means other than a dedicated word such as "the." Because languages can do perfectly well without words like "the" and "a" as those words are used as articles in English, perhaps it is not so shocking that modern grammarians prefer different category names for those words.My eighth grade English class was innovative in that it used a textbook based on phrase-structure transformational grammar to teach me a lot of my English grammar. I would be glad to see books like that (modernized based on further linguistic research since the 1960s when the book was published) used in classrooms today. The "traditional" grammar poorly taught in the United States is based on an Indo-European grammatical tradition that is not completely lousy for teaching native speakers of Latin how to read and write Greek, but it has never been well suited for teaching analysis of English to native speakers or foreign-language learners of English. English has many grammatical features that are poorly described by the grammatical traditional of school lessons in English-speaking countries.For further reading on this point, see Steven Pinker's excellent new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.[1] For a better than average treatment of this point on Wikipedia, see the article "English language,"[2] which was updated to "good article" status during the most recent Wikipedia Core Contest, and is actually pretty decent for a Wikipedia article, with lots of references to good-quality reference books about the English language.[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/0670025852" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/06...</a>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language</a>

Anderkent将近 10 年前

>(If you have pronoun as a part of speech, that would be a very clever answer, but you're going to have a lot of trouble convincing non-linguists of that.)Can someone elaborate on that?

iGoPro_HD将近 10 年前

I thought that I was the only one who was never taught this.Go public school system!

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marze将近 10 年前

The purpose of "the" is to reset the vocal tract to a neutral configuration, allowing the subsequent (and more arbitrary) word to be resolved more readily.

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