The Article în English and Romanian Languages

INTRODUCTION

As a rule, for a word for being considered as a noun ( and not a simple article from the dictionary ), it has to be accompanied in a sentence by a noun determinant.

The article is the most recent noun determinant and in modern English it can be represented by explicit forms, expressed by (definite article and the indefinite one ) or by stable forms and procltic ones .

The article is one of the most difficult chapters of the English grammar –due to the many functions that it can achieve, due to the usage diversity determined by the language styles , and the same time because of its frequency; one of the most important chapters of this grammar.

By the other hand, the usage differences of articles from the Romanian and the English languages are sometimes so big that their ignorance led to the biggest expression mistakes.

Many European languages that have grammatical article usually have their article agree with the gender of the noun..

In this research work I tried to establish a list of different types of articles and their usage .

CHAPTER I

The article presents to the student one of the most difficult and intricate problems of language structure. Although a great number of philologists have treated the article both in English and in other languages ; It will be only fair to say that even the most essential points concerning the theory of the article , still remain doubtful.

Concerning now the study of the Modern English article , we should first of all eliminate those problems which are of no real scientific interest , though they have been occasionally discussed. There are some arguments in favour of the article being a separate word and some argument to show that it was a morpheme.

This kind of approach , however , doesn’t seem to be the rightest one. It would mean that we start examining the article, a very peculiar phenomenon, morpheme is. Instead , we should first study the article as it actually exists and functions in the language , and only then see whether it will fit into only ready- mode category. It may well happen, that it will not; then we shall have to force the situation and take it for what it is worth.

Analyzing the article we must state in the first place , that there are languages which have no article . Besides, Russian and most other Slovenic languages , the Latin language, the Ancient Greek had only one article – the definite one .

Many languages as the Italian, Spanish, German have two articles - the definite one and the indefinite one.

As far as its form is concerned , the article may be devided from its noun by o6ther words, chiefly adjectives . However, in certain languages the article may also be a morpheme attached to the nouns as a ,kind of suffix.

CHAPTER II

2.1.Number and meaning of articles

It has been a long debated question how many articles there are in English. Obviously there are only two material articles:

o the definite article- the

o the indefinite article- a/an

The distinction thus ia, between , for instance:

,,the language / a language

The distinction thus can be obviously seen.

In coming now to the difference in meaning between the definite and the indefinite article, we should start by comparing two sentences which ar4e exactly alike in everything except that are has been the de finite article where the other has the indefinite article.

We ought to find several pairs of this kind and then try to get to the essence of the difference between them. So , let’s take these two in the first place: