| Chapter 2: | Background Study |
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Chapter 2
Background Study
Introduction
The acquisition of the English article system has been a subject of inquiry for linguists, psychologists, child language specialists, and second language acquisition (SLA) researchers; the system probably owes its wide appeal to the fact that the articles are important in a wide variety of discourse processes and in the interaction of linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge, and to the fact that they are very frequently used while at the same time difficult to learn.
Articles belong to the closed class of function words in English. Taylor and Taylor (1990) classified articles as prototypical function words because they have all the characteristics of function words. They “play syntactic roles, belong to a closed class, are highly frequent, are monosyllabic, have little semantic content, are not used alone in complete utterances, are unstressed in normal use, and are redundant and predictable” (p. 89). However, there are some problems with this characterization of articles. For one thing, not all researchers agree that articles contain little semantic