English Grammar Series - Articles (3)

Author: (English) Berry
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: Articles in English are very important for English learners, so we decided to publish a book specifically about articles. The article "the" is one of the most frequently used words in English, and when combined with "a" and "an," it accounts for 8.5% of all words in a text. "The COBUILD English Grammar Series" is written to address specific difficulties faced by English learners, and "Articles" is one of the books in the series. Many other languages also have articles or similar, with meanings very similar to those of English articles. The difference lies in usage—when to use articles, when to use the genitive case, when articles are mandatory, and when omitting them is more natural. For example, when discussing titles, in French or Italian, it is necessary to use the definite article before titles such as "professor." When a title is used with a name, articles are generally required unless it is used in direct address, whereas in English, titles are typically not preceded by articles. When usage issues arise, the importance of the evidence provided by COBUILD becomes very clear. This evidence comes from the COBUILD corpus (the Bank of English), a comprehensive collection of modern English data from various spoken and written sources. The computer archive of the COBUILD corpus currently stores approximately 300 million words, from which different usages can be identified, their significance measured, and the latest usage trends understood. All examples in this book (nearly 600) are selected from this vast COBUILD corpus. The data drawn from natural language lends authority to the book's explanations. (Why do I use "read an authority" rather than just "read authority"? See page 22, section 3.7.)