Facts and Figures About the Definite Article

In this month's edition of Language Facts & Figures, we look at (and listen to) the most commonly used word in English.

• Pronunciation: THEE and THUH
  THUH before a word beginning with a voiced (pronounced) consonant sound: the woman, the man, the one; THEE, often variable to THI, before a word beginning with a vowel sound: the actor, the idea, the only; THEE when emphatic: THEE best, THEE worst. . . .
  
  Most of us, when speaking naturally, get THUH distinction between THEE and THUH right without even thinking about it. It's when we start dwelling on it and imposing a misguided standard of correctness on ourselves that we begin to make a fetish out of saying THEE. Then our speech becomes stilted and stagy, because we are trying always to say things THEE "right" way instead of THUH natural way. So just relax and say THUH before all words beginning with a consonant, and THEE only before words beginning with a vowel sound, or for emphasis. That, in my opinion, is THEE best way to go.
  (Charles Harrington Elster, The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999)


• Duh
  Here is another curiosity of almost all American speech. We do not pronounce the th. That feature has been identified for years as extremely low-class--saying duh is reserved in movies and on television for dumb thugs, lovable taxi drivers, and people from Brooklyn. But dropping the th is a feature of all our speech. We don't say duh in that exaggerated way. We make a small clack with our tongue: Get outta tah way. However, if you speak into a tape recorder and your tape is played through a voice spectrograph which is able to grasp different sounds, it will be obvious to you that in a significant number of cases you do not make a th sound but this other sound. There is a difference in the way most Americans pronounce the.
  (Jim Quinn, American Tongue and Cheek, Pantheon Books, 1980)


• Uses of the Definite Article
  The can refer . . .
  • to the immediate situation or to someone's general knowledge:

    Have you fed the dog?
    He was wounded in the war.

  • back to another noun (what is sometimes called anaphoric reference):

    She bought a car and a bike, but she used the bike more.

  • forward to the words following the head noun (cataphoric reference):

    I've always like the wines of Germany.

  • to human institutions that we sporadically use, attend, observe, etc.:

    I went to the theatre.
    I watched the news on TV.

  (David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge University Press, 2003)


• Metonymic Uses
  Reference to shared knowledge immediately identifies the referent of, for example, the sun, the sky, the rain, the government, the political situation, the television.
  
  Clearly dependent upon inference for their interpretation, but totally normal in certain professional registers of English are metonymic uses, where the thing stands for the person, as in the following examples:

  The ham sandwich has left without paying.
  The kidney transplant in 104 is asking for a glass of water.

  (Angela Downing, English Grammar: A University Course, Routledge, 2006)


• British Versus American Usage
  Americans do have a thing for the word the. We say "in the hospital" and "in the spring"; the British sensibly omit the article. They favor collectives or purely regional sports team names, such as Manchester United or Arsenal, while we have the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels (which when you translate the Spanish becomes "the the Angels Angels"), and such syntactical curiosities as the Utah Jazz and the Orlando Magic.
  (Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, Broadway Books, 2007)


• Journalistic Omission of The
  In everyday news reporting journalists often delete the when providing readers with a thumbnail identity of the person just mentioned in the report:

  Peter Carey, (the) author of Oscar and Lucinda and ex-advertising man, has a gift for graphic description.

  As an appositional structure, this is grammatically straightforward. But the practice is sometimes applied before mentioning the person's name:

  Novelist and ex-advertising man Peter Carey has a gift for . . .

  This gives the person a "pseudo-title" (Meyer, 2002), a style which is well established in American news reporting but resisted in other quarters of the English-speaking world. It is strongly associated with journalese.
  (Pam Peters, The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, Cambridge University Press, 2004)


• In Names of Countries
  Today the only country names that take the in English are those that are plural in form, such as the United States, the Netherlands, and the Philippines, plus a few others whose name logically requires the article, such as the United Kingdom and the Ivory Coast (though the authorities in the second have been making strenuous efforts to persuade the English-speaking world to accept the French form Côte d'Ivoire). Other country names that formerly took the article now usually occur without it, such as Lebanon, Sudan, Gambia, and Ukraine. Citizens of some of these countries may find the use of the article rather offensive.
  (R.L. Trask, Mind the Gaffe! Penguin, 2001)


• With or Without a Capital T?
  Capitalize [the] uniformly in the names of newspapers, journals, and magazines: The New York Times, The Times; The Daily News, The News. But lowercase the when using a publication title as a modifier (the Daily News reporter), because in such a case, the is grammatically attached to the noun (reporter). Some publication names do not include the, even in conversation: Newsday; National Review; Reader's Digest; Congressional Quarterly.
  
  Lowercase the in names of organizations, companies, schools, restaurants, hotels, etc. And the country is the Netherlands, though its capital is The Hague.
  (Allan M. Siegal and William G. Connolly, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, Times Books, 1999)

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More About the English Language:

• Why Should I Study the English Language?
• What Is Standard English?
• Key Dates in the History of the English Language