The article as a meaning-forming operator in the English language Contents: Introduction

Chapter I. Linguistic status of the article and its accuracy category
1.1 Linguistic status of the article
The question is: is the article a separate part of speech or a word morpheme? If we treat the article as a word, we shall have to admit that English has only two articles - the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an. But if we treat the article as a word-morpheme, we shall have three articles - the, a/an and the zero article ш. B.Ilyish states that the choice between the two alternatives remains a matter of opinion. The scholar gives a slight preference to the view that the article is a word, but argues that: « we cannot for the time being at least prove that it is the only correct view of the English article ». [12;57]
M.Blokh regards the article as a special type of grammatical auxiliary: «The article itself is a special type of grammatical auxiliary»[1; 85] Linguists are only agreed on the function of the article: the article is a determiner, or a restricter. The linguistic status of the article reminds us of the status of shall/will in I shall/will go. Both of the structures are still felt to be semantically related to their `parent' structures: the numeral one and the demonstrative that (Old English sз) and the modals shall and will, respectively. The articles, according to some linguists, do not form a grammatical category. As is pointed out by B.Khaimovich and Rogovskaya: «the members of an opposeme must belong to the same lexeme and have identical meanings» [7;214] The articles, they argue, do not belong to the same lexeme, and they do not have meaning common to them: a/an has the meaning of oneness, not found in the, which has a demonstrative meaning. For this reason, they argue, a book and the book are not analytic structures.
B. Ylyish thinks that: «There seems to be nothing to prevent us from thinking that a room is an analytical form of the noun room...»[12;57] If we treat the article as a morpheme, then we shall have to set up a grammatical category in the noun, the category of determination. This category will have to have all the characteristic features of a grammatical category: common meaning and distinctive meaning. So what is common to a room and the room?
Both nouns are restricted in meaning, they refer to an individual member of the class `room'. What makes them distinct is that a room has the feature (-Definite), while the room has the feature (+Definite). In this opposition the definite article is the strong member and the indefinite article is the weak member. The same analysis can be extended to abstract and concrete countable nouns, e.g. courage: a courage vs. the courage. Consider: He has a courage equaled by few of his contemporaries vs. She would never have the courage to defy him. In contrast to countables, restricted uncountables are used with two indefinite articles: a/an and zero. The role of the indefinite article is to individuate a subamount of the entity which is presented here as an aspect (type, sort) of the entity. Consider also: Jim has a good knowledge of Greek, where a denotes a subamount of knowledge, Jim's knowledge of Greek. A certain difficulty arises when we analyze such sentences as The horse is an animal and I see a horse. Do these nouns also form the opposemes of the category of determination? We think that they do not: the horse is a subclass of the animal class; a horse is also restricted - it denotes an individual member of the horse subclass. Cf.
The horse is an animal vs. A horse is an animal. Unlike the nouns in the above examples, the nouns here exhibit determination at the same level: both the horse and a horse express a subclass of the animal class.