Absences d’article et zones d'empiètement

Abstract

This paper deals with all types of articles, their use and their “no-use“, as one of the traditional parts of speech, as “one of the odious instruments of our grammar" (Alexis François, La grammaire du purisme et l'Académie française au 18ème siècle, Paris, Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d’Édition, p. 70). It creates a real dividing line for the language phenomenon, because it divides languages into two distinct categories: languages with article and languages without article. Beyond the grammatical technicality created by the article system and the absence of article within the nominal group, this presentation allows us to rethink the noological and phenomenological necessity of this grammatical category. It is therefore necessary to wonder about the absence of articles in languages ​​with articles (French, German, English, Italian, Macedonian, etc.) and on the absence of articles in languages ​​without articles (Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Turkish, etc.). In languages ​​devoid of any article system, a determinant of numeral origin is related to the article. It appropriates an indefinite adjective value: “(a) certain”. Both possibilities or both ways to express articles in those languages ​make it possible to enrich the binary tensor in psychomechanics of language. It happens as soon as we add the median extensities, not reducible to the traditional scale known as “definite article” – “indefinite article” – “zero article”.

Keywords

• zero article
• absence of article
• article
• determinant
• numeral
• comparative linguistics