Page 174 - DENG401_Advance Communication Skills

Unit 9: Basic Grammar

Notes
Example: The ball is on the red mat.
A definite article is mostly used to refer to an object or person that has been previously
introduced.

Example: A bird was sitting on the branch. Looking me going towards it, the bird
flew away.
2. An indefinite article (a, an) is used before singular nouns that refer to any member of a
group.

Example: A man is a mammal.
A is used before words starting with non vowel sounds, while an is used before words
starting with a vowel sound, regardless of whether the word begins with a vowel letter or
not.

Examples: A hypothesis; an hour; a ewe; a hero; a one-armed bandit; an heir; a
unicorn, etc.
3. A partitive article indicates an indefinite quantity of a mass noun; there is no partitive
article in English, although the quantifiers some or any often have that function.

Examples: 1. Would you like some coffee?
2. Do you have any books?

9.3 Countable and Uncountable Nouns

We have all heard about nouns. Of course, we all know about them. They are naming words. So
in order to avoid redundancy in learning, we will limit ourselves to a select type of nouns.
In this unit we look at:
1. Countable Nouns
2. Uncountable Nouns

3. Nouns that can be Countable & Uncountable
Let us understand each of them one by one.

9.3.1 Countable Nouns

Countable nouns are things that we can count. Obviously, we can recognize them very easily.

Example: "pencil".
We can count pencils. We can have one, two, three or more pencils.

More examples can be:
1. cat, animal, man, person
2. bottle, box, litre

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