The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 4: The Cat and the fish

[This is Part 4. It'll make more sense if you read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 first]

In part 3, I explained how articles communicate vital information to enable the listener (or reader) to know whether to process some information as ‘new’ or ‘known’.

An obvious problem with this idea is that not all languages have articles. If articles are so vital, how come so many of the world’s languages manage perfectly well without them?

Well, I’d say that it’s the signalling function of articles that’s vital, not the actual articles themselves. I believe other languages signal the same distinction (between ‘new’ and ‘known’) using different tools.

Look at these sentences. Use your instinct to choose the best article for each gap.

[For simplicity, let’s ignore the possibility of Ø. Your options are a and the.]

• __ cat ate __ fish.
• __ fish was eaten by __ cat.

Image by joanna8555

Now, of course, you may protest that both a and the are possible in all four spaces. There’s no right and wrong answer, especially as I’ve provided no context whatsoever.

And yet … do you get the feeling that the first sentence feels a bit more natural as The cat ate a fish, and the second sentence feels better as The fish was eaten by a cat. In the first, it’s probably our pet cat that ate an anonymous fish. In the second, it’s more likely to have been our unfortunate pet fish that was eaten by an anonymous cat.

Why is that?

The reason is that there’s a universal tendency to put known information first and introduce new information later. I’m not just talking about languages here. Think about your favourite TV programme – a soap opera, say, or a chat show. When the programme starts, we hear the familiar music, see the usual presenter or the main characters, and perhaps there’s a reminder of what happened last time. Only then do they introduce the guests or new characters, or we learn something new. Known stuff first; new stuff later.

Or look back at what I did in my first paragraph above: I started this article by repeating something from part 3 first (known), before introducing the new topic of part 4 (new).

Language is the same. Almost every sentence we write or say starts with something known and then introduces the interesting news later in the sentence. Much of the grammatical juggling we do, from passive (The fish was eaten by a cat) to cleft sentences (What the cat ate was a fish / It was a fish that the cat ate), serves the purpose of moving interesting news away from the beginning of a sentence.

Now, I don’t speak every language, but I’m going to make an educated guess now. I think that same tendency exists in most, if not all, other languages. In other words, that vital distinction between new and known is primarily about word order.

In Polish, for example, which doesn’t have articles, it’s possible simply to switch the order of the subject and the object without the need for passive:

• Kot zjadł rybę. [cat ate fish]
• Rybę zjadł kot. [fish ate cat]

I’ve given a word-for-word translation in brackets, but in spite of these translations, both sentences have the same meaning. In both versions, it was the cat that did the eating. If you really wanted to say the The fish ate a cat, you’d have to say: 

• Ryba zjadła kota. (Or: Kota zjadła ryba)

An obvious problem with flipping word order like this is: how can you tell which is the subject and which is the object? That’s why my word-for-word translations didn’t really work. But if you look carefully at the Polish sentences above, you’ll see that the nouns change their form depending on whether they are the subject (kot, ryba) or object (kota, rybę). In Polish, even the verb sometimes changes, from zjadł to zjadła, to match the subject.

Now, as any learner of Polish can tell you (and I’ve been learning it since 1996), all these changes make it an incredibly difficult language to master. You could spend years studying all the different ways each word changes depending on the role it’s playing in the sentence (= its case).

The obvious question is: wouldn’t it be easier just to skip all the case endings and have a fixed word order instead? It would certainly make Polish much easier for poor non-natives like me to learn, but unfortunately, it would also mean that Polish lost a whole level of expressiveness. More specifically, it would be much more difficult to highlight whether information is new or known by moving things around in a sentence. And, as I’ve argued, that’s important.

I think this is actually a rather nice parallel. For Polish learners of English like Dorota, articles may seem pointless. For English learners of Polish like me, case endings may seem pointless. And yet both grammatical constructions serve a very similar function: to enable speakers to highlight new and known information, without losing the ability to distinguish between subjects and objects. English does it directly with new/known markers; Polish does it indirectly, with flexible word order as a middle step.

And actually, many of the world’s languages can be divided into those that have articles and (fairly) fixed word order, like English, French and Spanish, and those that have case endings and (fairly) free word order, like Polish and Russian. (I’m afraid I don’t know enough about other languages, especially non-European languages, to show how they fit in with this picture, but I’m guessing there are also parallels). German is unusual in that it has both articles and flexible word order, which seems a bit excessive, but at least it marks cases on the articles (der, den and dem, etc.) and not by changing the nouns themselves (at least, not much).

Now, of course English word order is not completely fixed. In fact, I demonstrated this earlier with my use of passive, and I also mentioned clefting as a way of moving things around. So articles are just one of several tools available to us to mark new/known, and usually we use two or more tools at the same time just to make sure (as in my cat/fish sentences above). And that’s what gives native English speakers the uncanny ability to spot mistakes with articles in non-natives’ writing: we notice clashes between word-order techniques and articles.

I suppose you could argue that these word-order techniques are enough by themselves, and that we don’t really need articles. Well, possibly. But there’s a limit to what you can do with word order, and it also gets very messy if you overuse passive and the like. What could be neater and more efficient than a couple of tiny words that explicitly mark new and known?

As you’ll have guessed by now, it all gets much more complicated than that. But I hope at last I’ve answered Dorota’s question. In the next parts, I’ll turn my attention to the way articles are traditionally taught in English classrooms … and I’ve got a lot of complaints!

The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 3: The Brain is like a Computer

[This is Part 3. It'll make more sense if you read Part 1 and Part 2 first]

In part 2, I suggested that articles are signalling devices, a bit like indicators on a car. But what exactly are they signalling?

To explain, I’ll use a different image: a computer.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time working with MS Word. So whenever I start work in the morning, I have two fundamental options: I can either Open an existing document, in order to make some changes or add new text, or I can create a New document in order to start from scratch. Two options: Open and New.

1 and /.

Now, let’s think of your brain as something a little like a computer. As we go through life, we are constantly adding knowledge and experiences to our own memory banks. I have no idea how the brain works, but wouldn’t it be logical if it used the same two-way choice: open an existing file in memory in order to change it, or create a new memory file.

Image by nico.cavallotto

So let’s say you’ve got one file in your memory for every person you’ve ever met. You create a new file every time you meet someone for the first time, and open that file every time you meet that person again or learn some new information about them.

Of course, sometimes we get it wrong, and lose track of who we’ve met before. Some of the most embarrassing situations involve forgetting somebody that we should remember:

A: Oh, hello, my name’s Jeremy. Nice to meet you. 

B: Er … I sat next to you in yesterday’s meeting. Don’t you remember?

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone wore a badge, saying either ‘You know me’ or ‘I’m new’?

To come back to computers, in my job as an editor, I receive dozens of MS Word files via email from writers. For example, the author of one of the books I’m editing has sent me the first draft of unit 5. Another author has re-drafted a unit, based on my criticisms and recommendations of their first draft.

But because I receive so many files, I often lose track of what’s a first draft and what’s a later draft. For this reason, I ask authors to include markers in their file names: D1 for a first draft, D2 for a second draft, and so on. So I know immediately what to do with each document when it arrives.

Where is all this going? Well, one of the key functions of language – any language, not just English – is to pass information from one person’s brain to another person’s brain. During a conversation, that other person receives thousands of pieces of information, all of which needs to be processed in her brain-computer. Some of the information requires her to create a new file; some requires her to open an existing file and make changes to it.

And, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, this is where articles come in. The basic meaning of ‘the’ is ‘Open an existing file in your memory’. The basic meaning of a/an and Ø is ‘Create a new file’ or ‘Add new information’.

A / an / Ø =/.

The = 1.

Articles are the badges that say ‘You know me’ and ‘I’m new’. They’re the markers in file names equivalent to my D1 and D2 markers. They are what allows us to process huge amounts of information quickly so we know what to do with it. They are important!

Of course it all gets much more complicated when you look into the details, but that’s not a good place to start … and to finish part 3.

The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 2: Articles and indicators

[This is Part 2. It'll make more sense if you read Part 1 first]

So … what’s the point of articles? The best way to think of them is like the indicator lights on your car. You use these to communicate three things: that you’re about to turn left, that you’re about to turn right, or that you’re planning to go straight on (signalled by not using the lights). 

	Image by JSFauxtaugraphy

There are three ways that this is a useful analogy. Firstly, think back to when you were learning to drive. Indicators were the easiest thing to forget. It was easy enough to use the steering wheel, and the pedals and gears were complicated but learnable. But when you’re concentrating on all those things, who has time to think about indicators?

Do they allow you to go faster? No. Do they make your life as a driver easier in any way? No. So what’s the point? If you think back to Dorota’s question in part 1, these were basically the same questions that she asked about articles. 

The answer to both questions, of course, is that indicators and articles aren’t there to help you, the driver / speaker. They’re there for the other drivers / listeners who have to work out your intentions and avoid crashes. I’ll explain this in much more detail as the series progresses.

Secondly, as I’ve just mentioned, non-use of indicator lights communicates an important message. In the same way, non-use of articles often communicates something very specific. That’s why we talk about three articles in English: a/an, the and Ø, where Ø is the zero article, i.e. the absence of an article. 

Thirdly, when we’re learning to drive, it doesn’t really matter if we forget to use indicators from time to time. We’re driving slowly enough, and there’s a big letter L on top of the car telling other drivers to expect us to make mistakes, and to take care around us. Learner English speakers don’t have L- plates, but they do tend to speak slowly and have quite strong accents, so it doesn’t really matter if they don’t use articles.

But think back to Dorota – she was extremely fluent and natural-sounding in English, so her non-use of articles was much more of a problem – like driving at 100 km/h with no indicators.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Here’s a summary of the main message communicated by each article and each indicator:

• left indicator / a/an: Watch out – I’m going to change direction.
• right indicator / Ø: Watch out – I’m going to change direction.
• no indicator / the: Don’t worry – I’m continuing in the same direction.

As you can see, skipping articles isn’t exactly like not using indicators. It’s like signalling right all the time. So Dorota was driving at 100 km/h with her right indicator flashing all the time. An accident waiting to happen. 

OK, so that’s the theory. I’ll bring this much more down to earth in part 3.

To be continued ...

The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 1: Dorota’s question

Many years ago, one of my colleagues came down to the factory in southern Poland where I was based, in order to teach an intensive English course with a manager called Dorota. Her level of English was incredible: she was extremely fluent and accurate, and didn’t seem to need an English course at all. By the end of day 1, my colleague was feeling bad: he felt that he hadn’t been able to teach her anything new during the whole day.

When I spoke to him at the end of day 2, however, he was feeling much better. He had identified Dorota’s main weakness in English. She never used articles (a/the). Dorota was Polish, and Polish people are well-known for having problems with articles; after all, there are no articles in Polish. But Dorota didn’t have a problem with articles – she simply didn’t use them at all.

So my colleague spent that evening photocopying whatever worksheets he could find that would help him teach Dorota about articles. There was a list of rules, there was a worksheet on articles and geographical names (e.g. __ Himalayas, __ Mount Everest) and a text with all the articles removed (e.g. My uncle is __ postman. He lives in __ small village in __ England). Armed with all these materials, how could he fail to teach her about articles and improve her English?

After day 3, I asked him how it had gone. “It was a disaster”, he said. She had refused to look at the rules, and hadn’t touched the worksheets. 

“As you said yourself, I speak very fluently and accurately”, she had explained to my colleague. “Everyone understands me. Why do I need articles? If I start worrying about which articles to use, it’ll slow me right down. It’ll make my English worse, not better. What purpose do they serve? How do they help me? If you can’t answer my question, I’m not going to learn your stupid, complicated rules”.

And that was the problem. My colleague couldn’t explain how articles would help her, and why she should even consider becoming less fluent in order to worry about these meaningless little words. That evening, he asked me for my advice, and I was also unable to answer Dorota’s question. 

But that wasn’t the end for me. I then worried about Dorota’s question for several years, and searched everywhere for an answer. Over the years, I’ve had quite a few insights into the purpose of articles and how they work – perhaps still not enough to satisfy Dorota, but I’d certainly be able to give her a sensible answer now. 

So that’s the purpose of this series of blog posts. Articles are one of the most misunderstood parts of English grammar. One day I hope to write a whole book about them. So be warned: this series could be quite long.

The Alps by coyote-agile

Isn't there more to articles than learning about names of mountain ranges?

To be continued ...