The English speaker has somehow acquired the "knowledge" that small towns have a single main street, and that therefore when speaking of that street, the the of natural property is used. This use of the is for "natural properties," but what English speakers consider to be natural properties of things and what speaker of other languages think may be different things. He's "supposed to" know who and where, but actually, he doesn't. It's as if had he opened the book to the middle and started reading. This use of the is a literary device to bring the reader into the story "midstream". This last piece of information comes from the phrase "the main street" which presents "old information," the common knowledge that towns have one or more main streets, and small towns have a single main street, designated as " the main street (of (a/the/0) town)". The listener / reader realizes that he is expected to know: Sentence 1a uses the three times before 'boy', 'main', and 'town'. A boy was walking down a main street of town. A boy was walking down a main street of a town.Ģd. A boy was walking down a main street of the town.Ģc. A boy was walking down the main street of the town.Ģb.
The boy was walking down a main street of town.ġe. The boy was walking down a main street of a town.ġd. The boy was walking down a main street of the town.ġc. The boy was walking down the main street of the town.ġb. The is used as a signal meaning that the speaker (/writer) wants the listener (/reader) to understand whether the thing being spoken of is shared (old) information, or new information, worthy of note.įor example, the following sentences can be considered for the opening sentence of a story: 1ġa. The word the is used to help us talk about things, rather than events. In that sense English is a rather materialistic language. The words it sends signals about are always nouns. It does not have any real meaning by itself, but rather it is used as a way of sending a signal about other words. The is one of the grammatical words of English.
#Another word for ruler of nations how to
And if you learn how to use this word, we will understand you clearly. If you understand how we use this word, you will have a key to how we look at the world. It helps us to divide the world into things which we agree are known, or important, and things which we feel aren't. The word the is very important to native speakers of English because it is used to divide the world we process through language into two categories: old information and new information. For them, for speakers of languages like Japanese, it is probably the most difficult English word of all to learn to use correctly. Unless, of course, the day comes when he has to try and teach the use of the word to speakers of a language which doesn't have it. Every speaker learns the use of the word the through years of experience, and probably never gives it a second thought. No native speaker has to consciously learn the many rules for its use. Yet no speaker of English has to study how to use this word in school.
Obviously, a word used this often must be very important to the speakers of the language. That word is the, the most frequently used word in the English language. Except perhaps in very short samples, there is always one particular word which appears more than all the rest by far. If you examine a sample of English writing or speech, and count how many times the various words in it appear, you will be struck by an interesting fact.
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