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The articles in English are the definite article the and the indefinite articles a and an.They are the two most common determiners.The definite article is the default determiner when the speaker believes that the listener knows the identity of a common noun's referent (because it is obvious, because it is common knowledge, or because it was mentioned in the same sentence or an earlier sentence).
Definite articles, such as the English the, are used to refer to a particular member of a group. It may be something that the speaker has already mentioned, or it may be otherwise something uniquely specified. For example, Sentence 1 uses the definite article and thus, expresses a request for a particular book.
For example, the articles a and the have more in common with each other than with the demonstratives this or that, but both belong to the class of determiner and, thus, share more characteristics with each other than with words from other parts of speech. Article and demonstrative, then, can be considered subclasses or types of determiners.
In English, for example, the words my, your etc. are used without articles and so can be regarded as possessive determiners whereas their Italian equivalents mio etc. are used together with articles and so may be better classed as adjectives. [4] Not all languages can be said to have a lexically distinct class of determiners.
For example, The Old Man and the Sea includes the article "The" because sentences such as "Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in 1951" are written with a capitalized "The". On the contrary, United States does not include the article "The", because sentences such as "California is part of the United States" are written with a ...
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Verbs and adjectives cannot. In the following, an asterisk (*) in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical. the name (name is a noun: can co-occur with a definite article the) *the baptise (baptise is a verb: cannot co-occur with a definite article)
All articles should have a short description, but some article titles are sufficiently self-explanatory to English language speakers worldwide that a descriptive annotation would not be helpful. Such articles can be give the short description "none". A short description should never be the same as the article's title.