Abstract
This study investigates the grammatical behavior of English country names based on corpus linguistic evidence. An overview of the basic patterns of definite article use with country names as commonly described in English reference grammars and of the morphological structures of English country names is presented. Against this backdrop, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is used to explore which (groups of) country names occur more or less frequently with a definite article. The data analysis reveals that virtually all of the English country names examined are, to some extent, used in the syntactic position following a definite article. It is shown that certain grammatical constructions call for the use of a definite article in connection with country names. However, the morphology of the country names also has a strong influence on how often they are used with a definite article. Furthermore, it is argued that the minority of English country names that do not fit this morphological pattern may differ because they derive from other place name types that generally take a definite article.
Highlights
English country names – Definite article use and morphologyBasic descriptions of article use with English country names, typically found in earlier linguistic treatises or reference grammars, tend to be restricted to the following “rules”: English country names do not take a definite article.There are certain systematic exceptions: plural names, name phrases involving a classifier noun, and abbreviations
While these rules capture central aspects of the use of the definite article with country names, they obscure the relatively high degree of variability we find in concrete usage data
The frequencies retrieved for article-based country name usage show that the rule that country names do not co-occur with a definite article is an abstraction or oversimplification, since all but one country name occur with a definite article in Contemporary American English (COCA)
Summary
Basic descriptions of article use with English country names, typically found in earlier linguistic treatises or reference grammars (such as Jespersen 1954, 545; Quirk et al 1985, 296), tend to be restricted to the following “rules”: English country names do not take a definite article. Berezowski (1997, 134) postulates an “iconic principle” (following Hewson 1972), which stipulates that the place name types that do not take a definite article are associated with geographical entities that have well defined boundaries, while the definite article is used with the other place name groups “to lend form to otherwise formless referents” (Berezowski 1997, 131) Such reasoning, is not entirely convincing, as it is hard to see why, for example, rivers should be treated as less well bounded than cities or bays. Among the “unexpected,” non-standard uses of singular country names with the, Kjellmer finds that many of them are genitives (the Peru’s, the Turkey’s etc.), whose (weak) propensity to take a definite article may be influenced by the fact that genitive forms are homophonous with plural forms, which in general take a definite article (the Netherlands, the Seychelles) Another usage pattern involves the use of country names with a definite article to metonymically refer to a national sportsteam (the Ireland “the Irish team,” the Portugal “the Portuguese team”)
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