INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents an inquiry into the phraseological aspects of article use. As has been shown so far, there is extensive theoretical support in the literature for the idea that language use is to a considerable degree phraseologically motivated, and some empirical evidence has already accumulated which corroborates this view. It has also been shown that linguistic attempts to capture the functioning of the English articles in the form of rules are not only extremely complex, but they have relatively little predictive power, which negatively impacts their usability in English language teaching. In view of the overwhelming number of rules pertaining to article use and the apparent contradictions between them, it stands to reason that some facilitating mechanism may be playing a role in the correct use of articles, both for native and non-native speakers. As language users rely to a significant extent on the partly automatized retrieval of some word combinations, and articles are part of those word combinations, it is possible that making correct article choices is aided by the “idiom principle.” This would hold true even when the use of an article can be explained by reference to a specific grammatical rule.

This chapter presents two investigations which put this hypothetical possibility to the test, bringing together the research I have conducted on the topic and showing the development of my methodological approach to investigating the issue. The first study reported here has been published previously (Leśniewska, 2016). For that reason, this chapter includes sections of text that are reproduced from the original article: section 8.2.1 on the participants, section 8.2.2 on the instruments and the procedure, and section 8.2.3 on the analysis, results and discussion.

PURPOSE AND RATIONALE

As could be seen in Chapter 5, studies on articles in L2 English are numerous, but the assumption which underlies most of them is that articles are rule-governed. This perspective is largely justified, as the English article system is indeed based on the key notions of definiteness, specificity and genericity, as well as on the countability and number of nouns, and on the distinction between proper and common nouns. However, the rules provided never account for the totality of article uses in natural language, as was demonstrated in Chapters 2 and 3.