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The grammatical nature of the English article, and its
"linguistic nature" have not been still finally determined. The
question concerning the place of article in the system of lexical-
grammatical classes of words is still a disputable one. A lot of
grammars treat article as a special part of speech though we can
notice a striking difference of the article both from notional
words (повнозначні слова), such as nouns, pronouns, etc, and
from functional words (preposition, conjunction) which express
syntactic relations between words or sentences.
Yu.O. Zhluktenko agrees with the English philologist B.O.
Ilyish that the English article is on the border between the word
and the morpheme. Though the article in the German language is
undoubtedly a separate word, since it changes according to
gender, number and cases.
All functions of the English article are directed towards
either determining the meaning of the noun or its grammatical
relations. Its semantic function is considered to be its ability to
point out the generalization or specification (узагальненість або
конкретність) of some notion, expressed by the noun. Its
morphological function is to serve the index (слугувати
показником) of the noun as a part of speech (compare: rich
(багатий) and the rich (багачі)). Its syntactic function is to
separate the noun group with its attribute from other parts of the
sentence. So, the English article is the auxiliary word- morpheme
which functions in the sphere of one part of speech — the noun,
serving as its formal index. (Це допоміжне слово-морфема, яка
функціонує у сфері однієї частини мови — іменника,
обслуговуючи її як формальний показник).
In reality, the article does not have a lexical-grammatical
meaning, as true words, but only a grammatical-functional
meaning, which is realized, like by morphemes, by its connection
with the noun and is the component part of the common meaning
of this combination.

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