What parts of speech are a, an, and the?
1 Answer
Nov 16, 2017
They are articles.
Explanation:
Articles are a type of adjective that give some information about a noun. They can only ever be used in association with a noun.
Technically, there are 2 of them:
-
a (which becomes an when preceding a noun starting with a vowel) is the indefinite article.
-
the is the definite article
To seem them at work, we can say:
An apple fell off the tree.
Do we know which apple? No - it's indefinite. All we know is that some random apple fell off the tree. Do we know which tree? Yes - it's definite. What we know is that from that tree, some random apple fell.
