Article (grammar)

The definite article can also be used in English to indicate a specific class among other classes: However, recent developments show that definite articles are morphological elements linked to certain noun types due to lexicalization.

The Māori language has the proper article a, which is used for personal nouns; so, "a Pita" means "Peter".

Its presence can be accounted for by the assumption that they are shorthand for a longer phrase in which the name is a specifier, i.e. the Amazon River, the Hebridean Islands.

[citation needed] Where the nouns in such longer phrases cannot be omitted, the definite article is universally kept: the United States, the People's Republic of China.

This distinction can sometimes become a political matter: the former usage the Ukraine stressed the word's Russian meaning of "borderlands"; as Ukraine became a fully independent state following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it requested that formal mentions of its name omit the article.

If a name [has] a definite article, e.g. the Kremlin, it cannot idiomatically be used without it: we cannot say Boris Yeltsin is in Kremlin.Some languages use definite articles with personal names, as in Portuguese (a Maria, literally: "the Maria"), Greek (η Μαρία, ο Γιώργος, ο Δούναβης, η Παρασκευή), and Catalan (la Núria, el/en Oriol).

Such usage also occurs colloquially or dialectally in Spanish, German, French, Italian and other languages.

In Hungarian, the colloquial use of definite articles with personal names, though widespread, is considered to be a Germanism.

Linguists interested in X-bar theory causally link zero articles to nouns lacking a determiner.

In many languages, the form of the article may vary according to the gender, number, or case of its noun.

[8] The word he, which is the indefinite article in Tokelauan, is used to describe ‘any such item’, and is encountered most often with negatives and interrogatives.

[8] ‘Vili ake oi k'aumai nā nofoa’ in Tokelauan would translate to “Do run and bring me the chairs” in English.

[8] Occasionally, such as if one was describing an entire class of things in a nonspecific fashion, the singular definite noun te would is used.

[8] In English, ‘Ko te povi e kai mutia’ means “Cows eat grass”.

The ko serves as a preposition to the “te” The article ni is used for describing a plural indefinite noun.

‘E i ei ni tuhi?’ translates to “Are there any books?”[8] Articles often develop by specialization of adjectives or determiners.

Joseph Greenberg in Universals of Human Language describes "the cycle of the definite article": Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and in turn can become generic articles (Stage II) that may be used in both definite and indefinite contexts, and later merely noun markers (Stage III) that are part of nouns other than proper names and more recent borrowings.

For example, the definite articles in most Romance languages—e.g., el, il, le, la, lo, a, o — derive from the Latin demonstratives ille (masculine), illa (feminine) and illud (neuter).

The Basque distal form (with infix -a-, etymologically a suffixed and phonetically reduced form of the distal demonstrative har-/hai-) functions as the default definite article, whereas the proximal form (with infix -o-, derived from the proximal demonstrative hau-/hon-) is marked and indicates some kind of (spatial or otherwise) close relationship between the speaker and the referent (e.g., it may imply that the speaker is included in the referent): etxeak ("the houses") vs. etxeok ("these houses [of ours]"), euskaldunak ("the Basque speakers") vs. euskaldunok ("we, the Basque speakers").

Speakers of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, a modern Aramaic language that lacks a definite article, may at times use demonstratives aha and aya (feminine) or awa (masculine) – which translate to "this" and "that", respectively – to give the sense of "the".

The existence of both forms has led to many cases of juncture loss, for example transforming the original a napron into the modern an apron.