Nouns. Semantic groups and grammatical categories. The category of determination. The problems of the article

 
Grammatical determination of the noun 
The article is generally treated as a marker of the noun - full or partial, e.g. a man, the rich. 
However, not all nouns are invariably used with the ‘material’article, e.g. strength. Even 
countables are not always preceded by the material article, e.g. books. Besides the article, nouns 
are identified in the sentence by other determiners (pronouns, numerals), prepositions, by the 

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presence of appropriate affixes, their relative position (i.e. by the co-text). The role of the article 
is often secondary, or supplementary. To prove this, compare the texts below: the original and its 
version in which the nouns have been stripped of the articles: 
It was a hot day. The two windows opened upon the distant murmur of London. The 
burning sun of July danced on the rosy and grey waters of the Thames (J. Galsworthy). 
It was hot day. Two windows opened upon distant murmur of London. 
Burning sun of July danced on rosy and grey waters of Thames. 
Despite the absence of the articles in the second text, the reader still finds the passage 
comprehensible from a semantic point of view. The elimination of the definite article from the 
word-combination two windows only affects the communicative structure of the sentence as 
compared to the original: the two windows conveys thematic information, while two windows 
conveys rhematic information. 
Yet, we should not minimize the role of the article as a noun-marker: the article speeds up 
the process of identification and, consequently, it speeds up the process of the comprehension of 
the text. In this respect the article can be said to act as a compensatory mechanism for the scarcity 
of derivational affixes which would help us to differentiate nouns from the other parts of speech, 
verbs in particular, e.g. ship sales where ship may be a noun or a verb, and sales may be a noun or 
a verb.
Besides the article, the noun can be determined by pronouns (all, any, some, another, each, 
every,either, neither, no; this/that, these/those; my, your, his, her, its; our, their; much /many; little 
/a little; few /a few; several), numerals (one, two; first, second, etc.), and a genitive noun (John’s 
coat). 
The category of determination can be given even a broader interpretation: 
it will then include notional words proper such as adjectives, numerals, nouns, adverbials, non-
finites, which, when used with nouns, also function as determiners, or restricters. The article can 
be attributed to grammatical determiners on the ground that its meaning is the least specific. 
Determiners expressed by pronouns are semigrammatical determiners, for, apart from the function 
of individualization, they express other functions. Consider, for example, the definite article and 
the demonstrative pronoun. The definite article identifies the entity by referring it to its prior 
mention (anaphoric reference) or to its prospective mention (cataphoric reference), e.g. A man 
came in.