The Presence/Absence of the Definite Article ‘The’ in Other LanguagesAgainst the backdrop of English, having only one definite article ‘the’, in Spanish one needs to choose from among four definite article, namely, el, la, los and las. We will, therefore, explore the specifics of the subject proper, that is, the use, misuse and non-use of THE in the English language. Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham, and who pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching, says that “the English word ‘the’ is by far the commonest word in English”. Further, apart from THE being one of the important grammatical words of the English language, on its own it does not have any absolute/real meaning. The errors found were of two main types, the omission of the definite article, and the incorrect addition of the definite article.

Source: The Nation June 30, 2021 00:56 UTC