The second qualification we make concerning grammar rules is that they often appear to be arbitrary formulations. For example, learners of English are told that it is possible to place a direct object after a certain kind of two word, or phrasal, verb when the direct object is a noun, but not when the direct object is a pronoun. | Chapter Articles Introduction The English articles . definite the indefinite a an and unstressed some sam as well as the use of no article at all are part of a larger system of reference and determination that we continue to discuss in the next chapter. However the learning difficulty and frequency of the articles1 has convinced us to treat them as a separate topic before taking on the larger systems in which they function. Articles are understandably problematic from a cross-linguistic perspective most Asian and Slavic languages and many African languages have no articles. Even those languages that do have articles or article-like morphemes . French Spanish Farsi the Scandinavian languages and the Semitic languages often use these morphemes in ways that differ from English. For example many of these article-using languages mark the generic use of an abstract noun with their equivalent of the definite article. Thus instead of saying Beauty is truth as the English poet Keats did the literal equivalent of this sentence in many of these languages would be The beauty is the truth. Also some of these languages . Farsi and some Scandinavian languages can indicate definiteness or indefiniteness with a suffix or morpheme following the noun as opposed to the invariant prenominal position that articles have in English. You may be wondering at this point how languages without articles can signal definiteness or indefiniteness. The most common means is word order that is the noun in topic position is definite whereas a noun in comment position tends to be Thompson 1978 gives us a functional explanation for the evolution of the English article system She says that languages like English that use word order to signal grammatical relations such as subject and object tend to develop articles because given versus new information cannot be consistently signaled through word order as they arc in topiccomment languages like Russian and Chinese which tend not to .
