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An indefinite article is an article that marks an indefinite noun phrase. Indefinite articles are those such as English " a " or "an", which do not refer to a specific identifiable entity. Indefinites are commonly used to introduce a new discourse referent which can be referred back to in subsequent discussion:
The articles in English are the definite article the and the indefinite articles a and an.They are the two most common determiners.The definite article is the default determiner when the speaker believes that the listener knows the identity of a common noun's referent (because it is obvious, because it is common knowledge, or because it was mentioned in the same sentence or an earlier sentence).
The interrogative personal pronoun who exhibits the greatest diversity of forms within the modern English pronoun system, having definite nominative, oblique, and genitive forms (who, whom, whose) and equivalently coordinating indefinite forms (whoever, whomever, and whosever).
In the sentence The man sees the dog, the dog is the direct object of the verb "to see". In English, which has mostly lost grammatical cases, the definite article and noun – "the dog" – remain the same noun form without number agreement in the noun either as subject or object, though an artifact of it is in the verb and has number agreement, which changes to "sees".
There is no definite or indefinite article in Latin, so that rēx can mean "king", "a king", or "the king" according to context. Priscian, or the Grammar, marble cameo panel dated 1437–1439 from the bell tower of Florence, Italy, by Luca della Robbia. The scene is an allegory of grammar and, by implication, all of education.
The term zero article refers to the phenomenon wherein grammatically valid noun phrases contain no articles, either definite or indefinite.It is also used in reference to a theoretical zero-length article that can be said to be used in place of an expected article in some situations.
"Dative" comes from Latin cāsus datīvus ("case for giving"), a translation of Greek δοτικὴ πτῶσις, dotikē ptôsis ("inflection for giving"). [2] Dionysius Thrax in his Art of Grammar also refers to it as epistaltikḗ "for sending (a letter)", [3] from the verb epistéllō "send to", a word from the same root as epistle.
The most common of these are the definite and indefinite articles, the and a(n). Other determiners in English include the demonstratives this and that , and the quantifiers (e.g., all , many , and none ) as well as the numerals .