Meanings and functions of the article in English

ARTICLE THE
Meanings and functions of the article in English.
Nowadays we have different points of view on the status on the article. Some grammarians define the article as a separate word (O. Jespersoen, M.Y. Blokh) and the others define it to be a morpheme (G.N.Vorontsova). Article is a determining unit of specific nature accompanying the noun in communicative collocation.
It has been a long debated question how many articles there are in English. Obviously there are only two material articles, the definite article the and the indefinite article a (an). However, the noun language, and indeed many other nouns, are also used without any article, as in the sentence Language is a means of communication. It is obvious that the absence of the article in this sentence is in itself a means of showing that "language in general", and not any specific language (such as English, or French, etc.), is meant. Now the question arises, how this third variant is to be treated. The older grammatical tradition described it as "omission of the article", which is obviously inadequate, since there is not the slightest reason to believe that the article in such cases was ever "omitted". Another view is that we should describe this as "absence of the article", and sometimes this notion is made more precise and the phenomenon is called "meaningful absence of article". A third view, which has been gaining ground lately, is that the very absence of the article is a special kind of article, which is then termed "zero article". According to this view, then, there would be three articles in English: definite, indefinite, and zero.
The articles have morphologic, syntactic and communicative functions.
The morphological function of the article consists in serving as an indicator of the noun: the presents of the article signals that what follows is a noun.
The article has two syntactic functions: the article separates the noun phrase from other parts of the sentence; the article may connect sentences within a text by correlation a noun it modifies with some word or a group of words in the previous context.Thus, the article in such a case has connecting function.
The articles also have the communicating function. The noun with indefinite article may introduce new information in the sentence: it is then the focus of communication («the rheme» of the sentence).
A noun with the definite article in the initial position usually indicates driven information and is not the focus of communication («the theme» of the sentence).
The indefinite article and the absence of article (the zero article) have the nominating, classifying, numeric and generalizing meanings. As the indefinite article is used only within singular nouns, the absence of the article before plural nouns has similar meanings (the only explication being the numeric meaning).
The principal meaning of the indefinite article is to denote what kind of object (thing, person, etc.) the speaker has to do with. This is the nominating meaning as we gave a name to an object we have in mind.
The indefinite article may assign an object to a certain class or kind of similar objects. That may be called as classifying meaning of the indefinite article. 
In the case of nominating meaning plural nouns may be preceded by words like some, several, a few or by a numeral. Sometimes the meaning of the oneness becomes predominant. In such cases we can speak of the numeric meaning of the indefinite article. The indefinite article always has the numeric force before the numerals: hundred, thousand, million and the nouns dozen and score.
In the generalizing meaning the indefinite article indicates that the following noun denotes a typical member of class. Plural nouns in the generalizing meaning are used without any articles.
The definite article is used with both singular and plural nouns. The definite article has specifying meaning and the generic meaning.
In the specifying meaning the definite article denotes that the following noun refers to a particular object (thing, person, etc.) or particular objects as distinct from all others of the same class.
The definite article is used in the generic meaning when reference is made to a class of objects as a whole.
List of reference:
1. Blokh M.Y. «Noun. Article determination».
2. Ilyish B.A. «The Article».
3. Л.А. Брамина, И.П. Верховская «Практикум по английскому языку: артикли».