This week I’m going to start the first in a series of blogs on the 200 key words in English. These are called key words because they are the most commonly used or most important words in English. These words were developed by Scott Thornbury. Please see http://www.tefl.net/reviews/natural-grammar.htm
Today’s word is ‘the.’ The grammar word for it is the DEFINITE ARTICLE. There is quite a bit I could say about ‘the’ because we use it in a number of different contexts.
To put it simply, the definite article ‘the’ is used to refer to a specific instance of the noun, often already mentioned in the context or easy to identify. Definite articles are slightly different from demonstratives (like ‘this’), which often indicate the location of nouns with respect to the speaker and audience.
* “Let us look for a good restaurant.”
* “What about the restaurant at which we ate last week?”
* “That restaurant was terrible. What about this one on the corner here?”
