CHAT: Definite/Indefinite Article Distinction\

Thomas R. Wier scripsit:

> In my very brief exposure to French, I found the indefinite
> use here of _des_ *far* more frequent textually than _some_ would
> ever be in English texts.  One would think that an article, if it
> truly is such, would be relatively frequent on a textual basis.
But in French almost all NPs begin with an article or equivalent, whereas
English is very free with article-less NPs.  So French is no basis for
judgment.  In particular, "le" and friends (as I posted a while back)
are moving toward becoming mere syntactic sugar, and the truly definite
article is becoming "ce".

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John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
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