Dialect speakers in the North of England use vowel-less forms of the definite article (the) which are unattested in English varieties elsewhere and have been termed Definite Article Reduction (DAR). Previous research on DAR has provided detailed phonological descriptions, but less insight has been gained into other aspects of DAR like its emergence and the northern pattern of occurrence. I demo...

Interlocutors are typically thought to keep track of information that is shared between speaker and listener (i.e., common ground) and information that is available only to the speaker (i.e., privileged ground). In this study, we investigated whether speakers take their interlocutor’s knowledge into account when choosing between definite articles (e.g., the) and indefinite articles (e.g., a) in...

Genre analysis as an area of great concern in recent decades, involves the observation of linguistic features used by a determined discourse community. The research article (RA) is one of the most widely researched genres in academic writing which is realized through some rhetorical moves and discursive steps to achieve a communicative purpose. This study aimed at proposing a model of generic p...

In this article, I argue that neither of the two main approaches to definiteness, familiarity or unique identifiability, provide necessary or sufficient conditions for the use of the definite article in English. I propose instead that the basic meaning of the article is to signal the accessibility of a discourse referent, more specifically, the availability of an access path through a configura...

The problems encountered by English learners whose mother tongue does not have an article system have been researched extensively. The problems encountered by learners whose mother tongue does have an article system, such as Arabic, have been studied less. This article describes an enquiry into article system errors in a corpus of English writing by tertiary-level L1 Arabic speakers. Frequencie...

Since Heubner's (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by L2 learners from article-less and article languages. The present study investigated how Persian L2 learners of English produce and interpret English definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions. It was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same central sema...