INTRODUCTION

Traditional descriptive treatments of articles are by far the most widely used in language teaching. They inform a vast majority of textbooks, pedagogical grammars, and teaching materials. They are also important for studies on article acquisition and use in L2, though in research there is a greater variety of theoretical approaches, with a number of studies adopting the functionalist, generative, or cognitive approaches, as will be seen in Chapter 3 of this book.

In order to establish a descriptive framework for the discussion of articles, I will draw on a number of descriptive grammars of English. The two most often used sources will be referred to in an abbreviated form: the widely-used and influential comprehensive grammar entitled The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999) will henceforth be referred to as Longman Grammar, while the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002) will be referred to as Cambridge Grammar. A result of a large cooperative project, the Longman Grammar was very innovative in its day, as it was based on corpus-derived data. It remains a popular source of information and terminology for researchers in the field of SLA and for developers of language teaching materials. Regarding terminology, the Longman Grammar is mostly consistent with the classic Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985). The Cambridge Grammar is another extensive and detailed description of the English language system, which in many ways departs from the Longman Grammar in terms of theory and terminological aspects.

THE CLASSIFICATION OF ARTICLES AS PARTS OF SPEECH AND SENTENCES

In descriptive grammars of English, articles are usually classified as belonging to the larger category of determiners, which are function words used to specify the reference of a noun (Longman Grammar, p. 259). Determiners, in turn, are studied as part of the noun phrase.

Various descriptive grammars use different terminologies to present the structure of the noun phrase (NP), or, as it is sometimes called, noun group (Downing & Locke, 1992). Barring differences in terminology, the structure of the NP in English is presented as consisting of pre-head elements, the head, and post-head elements.