Text 1887, 79 rader
Skriven 2007-06-15 16:53:28 av alexander koryagin
     Kommentar till en text av Dallas Hinton (1:153/715)
Ärende: Re: at the school
=========================
spam filter disabled)
From: "alexander koryagin" <koryagin@erec.ru>

F2EP
Hi, Dallas Hinton! How are you?
on Thursday, 14 of June, you wrote to alexander koryagin about "at the
school"

 ak>> My aunt is [a] teacher. She works at [] school. [The] school is
 DH>                not optional              see below   Not optional

 ak>> good. My aunt is not at [the] school now.
 DH>                      here, and in the blank brackets above, the article
 DH> is neither optional nor required!!

or = none.
So as far as I can understand your last phrase there must not be any article
in the sentence like "My aunt works at school" even if we speak of the
school we mentioned before. May be it was a typesetter error in St.
Petersburg "KARA" print-house which printed the book. Ok, I wanted to hear
something like this.

 DH> To say, "School is good" is somewhat baby talk, or (in Western writing)
 DH> an author trying to make a character sound like a foreigner who doesn't
 DH> speak English well.

May be - the author of that book is really a Russian English teacher. But I
think the mentioned part of that textbook was devoted exactly to the
articles (how to use them) and he gave examples which are as simple as
possible (to concentrate on the issue). The pair "My aunt works at school"
and "The school is good" imho designed to fix the rule that at first we have
to use the article "a/an"  and after that "the"; and another rule concerning
"at school."

Do you know English complicated enough to avoid long sentences. And students
have a lot to think about. For example ;-)
-----------
Where is the cat? - The cat is on THE sofa.  [Yea - on THE sofa - we know
the sofa we are talking about] ;-)
-----------
But
-----------
Where are the flowers? - The flowers are in A beautiful vase. [Ouch! - we
also know the vase we are speaking about! May be it is small object like in
the phrase "the book is on a little table"? Let's see another example]
-----------
I can see a nice bird. The bird is sitting in A big tree. The tree is green.
[Do I know the tree I am speaking about?]
-----------

In short English articles are a challenge for brains. ;)

 ak>> What about last sentence ("at the school")? What if I would say "My
 ak>> aunt is not at school now?"

 DH> Here the article is optional,

;)  I thought we had already discussed "at the school" and  "the article is
neither optional nor required!!"

 DH> but there is a slight implication that your aunt attends school but is
 DH> not there now, rather than (if you had said "a school") implying that
 DH> she is no longer part of the school system at all.

That school was a usual school. I think that not using an article when we
speak "at home", "at work", "at school" is colloquial shortening which
became a grammar rule. So may be correct to say "no article at all" if we
speak of a usual high school, for instance.


[...At the reception desk: How much is the room in this pigpen? - 40$ for
one pig 80$ for two]
Bye Dallas!
Alexanderdo7.english-tutor 2007



--- ifmail v.2.15dev5.3
 * Origin: Demos online service (2:5020/400)