The use of the article before the possessive form

As a rule, the article is referred to the noun in the possessive case form.

• a day’s work – работа одного дня.

• if it is expressed by the proper noun, the article is not used: Jane Stark’s papers.

• no article is used before abstract nouns like today, yesterday, tomorrow: yesterday’s newspaper, today’s meeting.

Though the paradigm of the English noun is presented by 4 grammatical forms, the number of the latter depends on the semantic kind of the noun

Common, count,l iving being	Singular	Plural
Common case	A student	students
Possessive case	A student’s	Students’

Common, count, inanimate	Singular	Plural
Common case	A table	tables
Possessive case	---	----

Common, uncount, abstract	singular	Plural
Common case	advice	---
Possessive case	---	----

proper	singular	plural
Common case	Tom, Europe	---
Possessive case	Tom’s, Europe’s	----

proper	singular	plural
Common case	------	The Urals
Possessive case	-----	----

The article

The article presents the Russian speaking with one of the most difficult and intricate problems of language structure because there are no articles in Russian.

The article is the structural / formal part of speech used with the noun modifying it.

The English articles (indefinite and definite) belong to a syntactic group of words which are called determiners whose function is to modify the noun. Besides the article, the group of determiners includes:

• demonstrative pronouns: this / that; these / those;

• dependent possessive pronouns: my, his, her, its, your, their, our;

• the pronouns - quantifiers: each, every, some, any, no, much, many, more, most, a few, few, a little, little enough and so on.

Remember that only one determiner can be used in a noun phrase: a rose, her rose, any rose, this rose, every rose, some English books, his new coat, the butter, a little butter, and so on.

It has been a long debated question how many articles there are in English. Some grammarians claim there are 3 articles in English: the indefinite, the definite and the zero articles. This assumption has reasonable grounds, as the absence of the article before a noun is also meaningful. We can illustrate this problem by comparing the following sentences:

1. English is a foreign language for me.

2. I don’t understand the language he is talking in.

3. Language is a means of communication between people.

What are the ideas denoted by the articles in these sentences?

In (1) there are many foreign languages, English is one of them (classifying)

In (2) the language he is using (specifying)

In (3) language is used in some general sense, like something non-concrete, something that has

acquired some abstract meaning (as a result of generalizing)

All these ideas are expressed in Russian variants of these sentences but not grammatically as it is done in the English ones with the help of aticles. In Russian the ideas are understood from the context of the whole sentence:

1. Английский для меня иностранный язык

2. Я не понимаю (тот) язык, на котором он говорит.

3. Язык – средство коммуникации между людьми.

Compare the other three sentences:

1. They bought a new bed.

2. The bed they bought was much bigger than the old one.

3. Yesterday he went to bed very early.

So articles are grammatical means to express various meanings typical of English nouns.