In grade school, I was taught that in English, there are eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. So then, which part of speech are “a” “an” and “the”? A preliminary Google search turned up all sorts of answers (they’re adjectives, they’re their own part of speech, they don’t belong to any grouping).
What’s the Straight Dope?
Thanks in advance.
My dictionary (Webster’s Collegiate) defines them as articles. If it’s good enough for Noah Webster, it’s good enough for me.
If I had to assign them to another part of speech, I might refer to them as an adjectives, as they do impart to the word a sense of specificity. “A” and “an” (the same word, actually, which exhibits positional morphological properties the name of which escapes me at the moment) are indefinite articles. When you use it in a sentence, “I picked up a hooker,” you aren’t referring to any specific hooker, to any aforementioned hooker, or to any hooker of which your listener or reader should have been aware. By context, the indefinite article gives clarification to the noun object, a function similar, I suppose, to an adjective.
When you later use the sentence, “The hooker turned out to be the one with whom Eddie Murphy was arrested,” you’re indicating to your audience that you had mentioned this particular noun object before and are now again referring to the same one previously described, and that Eddie Murphy has no taste in women.
In my opinion, that’s a pretty versatile adjective.
On the other hand, dictionaries cannot be considered the definitive last word on language, as the job of a lexicographer is to describe and document present usage of language, rather than to define it. A dictionary will only tell you how people do use words, rather than how they should use them. A few rogues, of course, are determined to be an authority rather than an archivist, and we end up with center/centre and color/colour. You might consider taking your grammar teacher’s “eight parts of speech” rule with a grain of salt.
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What else do you believe that you were taught in grade school? The reason you weren’t taught that articles were a part of speech is that Latin doesn’t have them. Latin was considered the only language with a grammar and anything that didn’t fit the Latin mold was ignored. Any way that English grammar differed from Latin grammar should be ignored, or at least deemphasized. This is the reason for such absurd “rules” as not ending sentences with prepositions or splitting infinitives, both of which are evidently perfectly good English rules, shown by their persistence despite the ravings of generations of grade school teachers.
I recall that in early 1964, an instant book was published called, The Lyndon Johnson Story. It was probably a terrible book, but I stopped reading the NY Times book review of it at the first sentence when the reviewer objected to the title because, “In English you cannot modify a noun with a noun”. There are not many practices of English more ubiquitous than that of modifying nouns with nouns. I decided that such an ignoramus was not worth reading. But I digress.
They are articles, of course. Beyond that, linguists include them in a larger class called determiners, which include possessive adjectives, demonstratives, and quantifiers, such as “my”, “that”, and “some”. Although they have some formal properties in common with adjectives, there are enough differences to make it worth while to keep them separate.