‘The’. It’s
omnipresent; we can’t imagine English without it. But it’s not much to look at.
It isn’t descriptive, evocative or inspiring. Technically, it’s meaningless.
And yet this bland and innocuous-seeming word could be one of the most potent
in the English language.
This story was
originally published in January 2020.
More like this:
- The surprising history of the word ‘dude’
- The story of handwriting in 12 objects
- What a single sound says about you
‘The’ tops the
league tables of most frequently used words in English, accounting
for 5% of every 100 words used. “‘The’ really is miles above
everything else,” says Jonathan Culpeper, professor of linguistics at Lancaster
University. But why is this? The answer is two-fold, according to the
BBC Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth. George Zipf, a
20th-Century US linguist and philologist, expounded the principle of least
effort. He predicted that short and simple words would be the most frequent –
and he was right.
The second reason is that ‘the’ lies at
the heart of English grammar, having a function rather than a meaning. Words
are split into two categories: expressions with a semantic meaning and
functional words like ‘the’, ‘to’, ‘for’, with a job to do. ‘The’ can function
in multiple ways. This is typical, explains Gary Thoms, assistant professor in
linguistics at New York University: “a super high-usage word will often develop
a real flexibility”, with different subtle uses that make it hard to define.
Helping us understand what is being referred to, ‘the’ makes sense of nouns as
a subject or an object. So even someone with a rudimentary grasp of English can
tell the difference between ‘I ate an apple’ and ‘I ate the apple’.
‘Scoring the goal’ seems more important than ‘scoring a goal’
(Credit: Alamy)
But although ‘the’
has no meaning in itself, “it seems to be able to do things in subtle and
miraculous ways,” says Michael Rosen, poet and author. Consider the
difference between ‘he scored a goal’ and ‘he scored the goal’. The inclusion
of ‘the’ immediately signals something important about that goal. Perhaps it
was the only one of the match? Or maybe it was the clincher that won the
league? Context very often determines sense.
There are many
exceptions regarding the use of the definite article, for example in relation
to proper nouns. We wouldn’t expect someone to say ‘the Jonathan’ but it’s not
incorrect to say ‘you’re not the Jonathan I thought you were’. And a
football commentator might deliberately create a generic vibe by saying,
‘you’ve got the Lampards in midfield’ to mean players like Lampard.
The use of ‘the’
could have increased as trade and manufacture grew in the run-up to the
industrial revolution, when we needed to be referential about things and
processes. ‘The’ helped distinguish clearly and could act as a quantifier, for
example, ‘the slab of butter’.
This could lead to a
belief that ‘the’ is a workhorse of English; functional but boring. Yet Rosen
rejects that view. While primary school children are taught to use ‘wow’ words,
choosing ‘exclaimed’ rather than ‘said’, he doesn’t think any word has more or
less ‘wow’ factor than any other; it all depends on how it’s used. “Power in
language comes from context... ‘the’ can be a wow word,” he says.
This simplest of
words can be used for dramatic effect. At the start of Hamlet, a guard’s
utterance of ‘Long live the King’ is soon followed by the apparition of the
ghost: ‘Looks it not like the King?’ Who, the audience wonders, does ‘the’
refer to? The living King or a dead King? This kind of ambiguity is the kind of
‘hook’ that writers use to make us quizzical, a bit uneasy even. “‘The’ is
doing a lot of work here,” says Rosen.
Deeper meaning
‘The’ can even have philosophical implications. The Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong said a denoting phrase like ‘the round square’ introduced that object; there was now such a thing. According to Meinong, the word itself created non-existent objects, arguing that there are objects that exist and ones that don’t – but they are all created by language. “‘The’ has a kind of magical property in philosophy,” says Barry C Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Basic English PDF BOOK DOWNLOAD
CLICK HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment