2018-02-10 - Parts of Speech: Articles

Parts of Speech

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - Nouns
• Part 3 - Verbs
• Part 4 - Pronouns
• Part 5 - Articles
• Part 6 - Adjectives
• Part 7 - Determiner
• Part 8 - Adverbs

Articles are used to indicate which entity a noun refers to. The direct article (The in English) is used to refer to a specific thing while the indirect article (A or An) is used to indicate a generic thing. A is used when the noun begins with a consonant sound while An is used when the noun begins with a vowel sound. For example it would be "A house" but "An H".

Articles are actually a type of adjective but I wanted to talk about articles specifically before talking about adjectives in general because articles allow us to be able to completely describe a simple sentence. The main parts of a sentence are the noun and the verb. The noun said what did something and the verb says what that something did. The article helps to indicate which something is being referred to and although they aren't required they do show up often.

Next we will go back a bit and talk more about adjectives.