The Grammatical Roles of the English Articles with Reference to Translation into Arabic

Abstract

In actual usage, nouns appear in noun phrases, and the kind of reference such a noun phrase has depends on the accompanying ‘determiner’. One can distinguish three classes of determiners set up on the basis of their position in the noun phrase in relation to each other:Central determiners (e.g., the, a, this).Predeterminers (e.g., half, all, double).Postdeterminers (e.g., seven, many, few).The definite and indefinite articles are the commonest central determiners and their distribution depends on the class of the accompanying noun. Usually, the definite article is said to precede the expression of entities already mentioned, and the indefinite article is claimed to precede that of newly introduced ones (de Beaugrande, 1980: 137).The present paper tries to show how, although the and a(n) do make up a grammatical system in Modern English, the two articles have quite different roles in the grammar. It also tries to show how the presence or absence of an article may result in an ambiguity having its bearing on the translation.