There are three articles; a, an, the in English.
There are two indefinite articles; a /an and one definite article ; “The”.
Indefinite articles - a, an: - To talk about things in general.
Indefinite articles refer to any person or anything that is not definite. Indefinite articles are used when you talk about unknown things. They are also used when you talk about something or someone for the very first time.
A or an is also used when something or someone is mentioned for the first time.
However, an / an is used before certain uncountable nouns as well according to the context.
“An” is used before words starting with a vowel sound (a,e,i,o,u) whereas “a” is used with the remaining; words starting with a consonant sound.
The definite article “the” is used to talk about known things. As the word itself suggests, it talks about a definite person, place, animal or a thing.
the man, the woman , the book
the girl, the pens
Uncountable Nouns:- the water , the happiness
Let’s distinguish the difference between the definite and indefinite articles in practical usage. We will analyze 15 different situations with many examples and learn how to know whether to use "the" or not.
When you use “the” in the second sentence, the listener knows which girl you are talking about.
You use “a” before your listener becomes aware of the person you are talking about. When you mention the same person again, you use “the”.
We use "the" before the nouns which are known to both the speaker and the listener.
(Referring to the documents in someone’s hand at the time of speaking)
(referring to the lift we usually use)
(Referring to the cinema in the town which they usually visit)
(The speaker is referring to a specific room which requires cleaning. Both the listener and the speaker are aware of it.)
(The listener is already aware of the window the speaker is referring to. Maybe it is the only window in the room)
(Even if you mention the garden for the first time, you won’t say “a” garden since, it is obvious that we usually have only one garden.)
(Anyone knows that a bike has only one wheel in the front)
The moon, the earth, the stars
When we talk about a class of animals or a group of people using a singular noun, we place "the" before it.
" the + singular noun" - the elephant
But “man” is an exception here. We do not say”the man” , we say “Man is the most dangerous animal in the world.”
However, when you refer to “elephants” in general and when you use a plural noun in doing so, we do not use “the” before it.
Humans are the most dangerous species in the world.
If you specifically refer to the elephants in the pageant, you can use “the” before it.
Similarly, with uncountable nouns which refer to things in general, we do not use “the”.
Milk is good for our health.
If you specifically refer to certain information you and the speaker know about, you can use “the”.
I prefer the milk from Nina’s Milk Shop.
Here you prefer a particular kind available in Nina’s Milk Shop. Therefore, we use “the” before it.
However, we should not get it confused with the following instances where we use “a” or “an” instead of “the”.
When we talk about different categories of people, about their professions and when we talk about people based on their religion or race, we use “a” or “an”. We don’t use “the” in the following examples.
Under section 9 below, we learn that with the names of certain mountain ranges, we use “the”. But with “Mountain Everest” we do not use “the”, which is an exception we should keep in mind.
We generally don’t use articles before proper nouns.
However, there are exceptions. With certain proper nouns, we use “the” ; names of mountain ranges, names of seas , rivers etc.
Certain countries refer to a geographical region which have many estates / countries included, hence we use ‘the” before the names of such countries.
Most of these names have words such as “republic”, “states”, “united”, “Kingdom” etc. In certain other cases, you can refer to these countries as plural countries. The names usually ending in “s” also have “the” before them.
Similarly, we use “the '' before the names of Organizations including acronyms which pronounce each letter individually.
But we don’t use ‘the” before Company names such as “Facebook”, “Google” etc.
There is another special case where we use “the” before proper nouns. When we use an adjective before a proper noun to specify it, we use ‘the” before it.
But when we refer to “Shakespear” alone, we do not use “the”.
“The” is used before nouns with qualifiers. Qualifiers help us identify or distinguish an object or a person from similar items of the same category.
(“red” is the qualifier here)
With the ordinals used as qualifiers
In the above examples, you can see that we have used ordinal numbers and the directions as qualifiers. Hence, we use “the” before the qualifier.
eg: north, south, west , east
(north is a qualifier here)
(“The east of Sri Lanka is a Prepositional Phrase)
We can also use such words alone to specify a place where we use ‘the’ before them.
Let’s take a look at the following two instances.
You use “a” since we refer to any pen, not a specific pen.
When you say;
We use “the” instead of “a” since we refer to a specific pen.
(You are referring to a specific person that the listener is looking for)
(When you introduce someone or something with a phrase or clause along with the qualifier “only”, we use ‘the’ before it. )
However, we do not use “the" before names of sports.
“At night” is an exception here.
We use "the" before nouns when we talk about them in sentences for reasons other than to the primary purposes they are generally referred to. Following is an example where we do not use "the" since we talk about these nouns referring to their general purposes.
We omit ‘the” when we talk about the general purposes of certain places.
Accordingly, we omit “the” before certain nouns such as “school”, “home”, “bed”, “church”, “university” , “hospital”, “prison”, “work” etc.
But when you refer to a place for a specific reason than the general purpose of it, we use “the”
The is omitted especially when certain words are not followed by any other word or phrase.
“school”, “home”, “bed”, “church” , “university” , “hospital”, “prison”, “work” , “sea” etc.
“Office” or a place of work is an exception here. Though you say,
With the word “office” when it refers to the place of work, we use “the”
The is omitted when above words are treated as adverbs to certain verbs.
A modal verb is a type of verb that indicates an opinion about something or someone. Modal verbs come under the category of Auxiliary verbs in English. Each and every modal verb expresses different opinions. This opinion or feeling is called “modality”......
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