English Grammar Series 3 -- Articles

Author: (English) Berry
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-06-01
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. "Cobuild English Grammar Series" is written for 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 English articles, but the differences lie 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, unless it is used in direct address to the person, the article must be added, whereas in English, titles are usually 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 data on modern English 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 importance can be measured, and new usage trends can be understood. All examples in this book (nearly 600) are selected from this vast Cobuild corpus, and the data taken from natural language makes the explanations in this book authoritative. (Why do I use "read an authority" instead of just "read authority"? See page 22, section 3.7.) If you have any questions about article usage that are not answered in this book, or if you have any comments or suggestions for improving Cobuild publications, please contact me.