Articles. I can never decide whether to put an article there or not.
Do you have some examples of sentences where this is particularly tricky? (I’m just asking out of curiosity—I’m a monolingual English speaker who never really studied the language explicitly, so the non-native perspective can be an interesting prompt to think about the rules that seem intuitive but are often pretty weird and complicated when you think about them.)
These are just one native speaker’s impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Your first two examples, to me, scan as being about abstract concepts; respectively: the emotion/quality of curiosity and the property of being in context.
This quora result indicates that it’s a quality of “definiteness” that indicates when articles get dropped (maybe as a second language learner you’re likely to already have this as knowledge, but find it difficult to intuit).
In those examples, the meaning doesn’t rely on pointing at two specific “curiosity” and “context” objects that have to be precisely designated, it relies on set phrases “out of curiosity” and “in context” that respectively describe an unmentioned action or object.
I think the article in the last example is dropped for a completely different reason. The “definiteness” argument doesn’t apply, but my instinct is that this is simple terseness in the communication from UI to user. Describing every UI element with precise language would result in web pages that resemble legal documents.
There are no real answers to these. Explanations for linguistic rules are no more than ways of remembering them. Different languages, even when the same concepts apply to them, have different rules about them. For example, “Curiosity killed the cat” vs. “La curiosité a tué le chat.” French uses the definite article more than English does. Why? It just does. Russian doesn’t have articles at all. In fact, over- or under-use of “the” is one of the main signs that tells me that the writer is a foreigner.
English treats month and day names as proper nouns, so capitalises them; French does not, while German capitalises everything. Go back a few centuries and English capitalised every important noun, and the really important ones would get caps and small caps.
Articles are hard! I was lucky enough to be raised bilingual, so I’m somewhat adept at navigating between different article schemes). I won’t claim these are hard and fast rules in English, but:
1 - ‘Curiosity’ is an abstract noun (e.g. liberty, anger, parsimony). These generally don’t have articles, unless you need some reason to distinguish between subcategories (e.g. ‘the liberty of the yard’ vs. ‘the liberty of the French’)
2 - ‘Context’ can refer to either a specific context (e.g. ‘see in the proper context’), in which case the articles are included, or the broad category (e.g. ‘context is everything’). ‘see in the context’ is not ungrammatical, but its usually awkward, because without an adjective its unclear which context you are talking about. (And if you were referring to one that was previously established, you would use ‘that context’ or ‘this context’). However, in the particular case of the button, ‘see in the context’ would be acceptable, because the identity of ‘the context’ is clear! I doubt a native English speaker would say that, though, because its not idiomatic.
3 - ‘hide the previous comment’ is actually correct here! However, in human-machine interfaces, articles, prepositions, and pronouns are often omitted to save space/mental effort.
Just pitching in on the last two: there’s an abbreviated register of speech in English called ‘note-taking register’ that has crept its way into a lot of parts of speech and writing, including website navigation. Dropping the definite article (or most articles in general) is a core part of that register.
Note taking = abbreviated English register. Has crept into parts of speech, writing inc. website nav. Dropping definite article core part of register.
I suspect dropping the definite article in ‘refresh page’ is not related to definiteness, it’s a linguistic tendency towards abbreviation. Funnily enough, it’s a trait shared by the stereotypical ‘robot voice’, as well as ‘baby voice’ and some others.
Do you have some examples of sentences where this is particularly tricky? (I’m just asking out of curiosity—I’m a monolingual English speaker who never really studied the language explicitly, so the non-native perspective can be an interesting prompt to think about the rules that seem intuitive but are often pretty weird and complicated when you think about them.)
Few quick examples:
Why is it “out of curiosity” and not “out of the curiosity”?
Why “see in context” and not “see in the context”? (See the button below this form)
Why “hide previous comment” and not “hide the previous comment”? (See the button above this form)
These are just one native speaker’s impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Your first two examples, to me, scan as being about abstract concepts; respectively: the emotion/quality of curiosity and the property of being in context.
This quora result indicates that it’s a quality of “definiteness” that indicates when articles get dropped (maybe as a second language learner you’re likely to already have this as knowledge, but find it difficult to intuit).
In those examples, the meaning doesn’t rely on pointing at two specific “curiosity” and “context” objects that have to be precisely designated, it relies on set phrases “out of curiosity” and “in context” that respectively describe an unmentioned action or object.
I think the article in the last example is dropped for a completely different reason. The “definiteness” argument doesn’t apply, but my instinct is that this is simple terseness in the communication from UI to user. Describing every UI element with precise language would result in web pages that resemble legal documents.
There are no real answers to these. Explanations for linguistic rules are no more than ways of remembering them. Different languages, even when the same concepts apply to them, have different rules about them. For example, “Curiosity killed the cat” vs. “La curiosité a tué le chat.” French uses the definite article more than English does. Why? It just does. Russian doesn’t have articles at all. In fact, over- or under-use of “the” is one of the main signs that tells me that the writer is a foreigner.
English treats month and day names as proper nouns, so capitalises them; French does not, while German capitalises everything. Go back a few centuries and English capitalised every important noun, and the really important ones would get caps and small caps.
Articles are hard! I was lucky enough to be raised bilingual, so I’m somewhat adept at navigating between different article schemes). I won’t claim these are hard and fast rules in English, but:
1 - ‘Curiosity’ is an abstract noun (e.g. liberty, anger, parsimony). These generally don’t have articles, unless you need some reason to distinguish between subcategories (e.g. ‘the liberty of the yard’ vs. ‘the liberty of the French’)
2 - ‘Context’ can refer to either a specific context (e.g. ‘see in the proper context’), in which case the articles are included, or the broad category (e.g. ‘context is everything’). ‘see in the context’ is not ungrammatical, but its usually awkward, because without an adjective its unclear which context you are talking about. (And if you were referring to one that was previously established, you would use ‘that context’ or ‘this context’). However, in the particular case of the button, ‘see in the context’ would be acceptable, because the identity of ‘the context’ is clear! I doubt a native English speaker would say that, though, because its not idiomatic.
3 - ‘hide the previous comment’ is actually correct here! However, in human-machine interfaces, articles, prepositions, and pronouns are often omitted to save space/mental effort.
Just pitching in on the last two: there’s an abbreviated register of speech in English called ‘note-taking register’ that has crept its way into a lot of parts of speech and writing, including website navigation. Dropping the definite article (or most articles in general) is a core part of that register.
I suspect dropping the definite article in ‘refresh page’ is not related to definiteness, it’s a linguistic tendency towards abbreviation. Funnily enough, it’s a trait shared by the stereotypical ‘robot voice’, as well as ‘baby voice’ and some others.