Search results for 'tag:Indefinite articles tag:Genders' matching tags 'Indefinite articles' and 'Genders'

Re: woman's

Taka — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:34:29 GMT

Milky wrote:
Depending on the context it could be part of a description, however imprecise, of women in general - generic qualities of the gender called "woman". Or, it could be describing a man who has such characteristics. Not sure if it would be used to desribe anything else.

Good!

So if a non-specific countable noun in the possesive form is used as a 'generic qualifier', it doesn't need to have the indefinite article 'a/an' in front?

(By the way, did you mean to say 'it could be describing a woman who has such characteristics'?)

Re: Grammatical gender

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 19:52:07 GMT

Yes, your question is really interesting. I'm Brazilian and consequently a Portuguese speaker. In my native language, like in Italian, French, Spanish and German (some languages that I've been studying, other than English), people use the definite and indefinite articles, pronouns, etc. according to the noun gender. We Brazilians (I'll try to answer for the country, forgive me if I'm wrong!) normally learn our language by thinking of words as having gender, be it masculine or feminine. And teachers of very young students teach them by using stories (fables) where objects and animals are really portrayed as male or female beings. This follows the way we think. In our stories, a fox is considered female because "raposa" is feminine in Portuguese ("a raposa"). I don't know if I answered your question but, by the way, I'd also like to know about English noun gender "exceptions" . For example, why do you, when referring to a ship, use "she"? Do you know where I could find a kind of list with some of these "exceptions" (I quoted because I don't know if English Grammar considers it this way) ?

Re: He has a good English

Chat_bleu — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 21:52:21 GMT

It's always hard for us to learn the things that don't exist in our own language. It's like the trouble we English speakers have with gender in the other European languages.

Unfortunately, I don't know a better way to explain the indefinite article. Actually the reason I'm here on this forum is so I can better my ability to intellectualize grammar so I can teach it because at the moment I only know what feels right to me as a native speaker. I was hoping someone else would have chimed in to give his/her input by now (hint, hint).

The best I can do for now is to say that you should just follow the general rule of putting an indefinite article if there's an adjective and just treat things like "he has good English" as exceptions to the rule.