On the Indefinite Article's Compatibility with Plural Nouns in English
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Abstract
This study aims to demonstrate that the indefinite article in English can pair with both singular and plural nouns. It is often claimed that the indefinite article in English necessarily matches only singular nouns within noun phrases. However, it is explained in syntactic and semantic terms that the indefinite article in English can combine with plural nouns as well as singular nouns. In syntactic terms, the noun phrase with two agreement elements follows the proximity condition in its agreement. If there is no explicit agreement element between the indefinite article and the head noun, it should only match the singular noun, as seen in “a dolphin” vs. “*a dolphins”. However, if there is another agreement element – a demonstrative, a quantifier or a number – between them, the head noun does not conflict but can combine with the indefinite article because the noun agrees in number with the other element, which immediately precedes it, as seen in “an amazing 200 students” vs. “*an amazing 200 student”. In semantic terms, the indefinite article can pair with plural nouns in a noun phrase, when indicating that the number or quantity of the head noun is approximate, as seen in “an estimated 500,000 migrants”, while it should combine with singular nouns in the other meanings.
Keywords:
indefinite article, plural, singular, noun, approximation, estimation, agreementAcknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2022 Spring Workshop of The Korean Association of Language Studies, held at Jeju National University on June 25, 2022. We thank the audience for their comments and feedback. We also thank two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their invaluable comments and suggestions.
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