More About Nouns!

Articles and the Noun Phrase

The article makes up part of what is referred to in the field of grammar as a noun phrase.  A noun phrase consists of: 

article + noun

Some examples of noun phrases in English are “the cat”, “a shirt”, “some books”, and “an apple”.  Here are some example of noun phrases in Spanish:  “un gato (a cat)”, “los caballeros (the gentlemen, the cowboys)”, and “unas sillas (some chairs)”. 

Like other romance languages, Spanish nouns are separated by gender (i.e. whether or not the noun is masculine or feminine) and number (whether the noun is singular or plural).  It is important to understand that when we’re referring to “gender”, we’re referring to a grammatical classification of a noun, not whether or not the noun has masculine or feminine qualities. 

There are four possible configurations of noun phrases in Spanish: singular masculine, singular feminine, plural masculine, or plural feminine. 

To understand the nature of an article, let’s look at the following chart:

	Singular	Plural
Masculine
Feminine

Like our verb charts we memorized from earlier, we should memorize the noun charts as well since they will come in handy later on in advanced lessons when we talk about pronouns, or rather, grammar parts that take the place of nouns. 

This may seem like a lot of information to take in, but if you give it time and start looking at each noun and a specific noun phrase, then you will have laid down a solid foundation for learning more advanced grammar concepts later, like the use of pronouns. 

The Definite Articles

A definite article is an article in a noun phrase that defines or clarifies a specific noun entity.  It is “definite” or “known” as to what noun we are referring.  The only definite article in English is “the”.  This definite article can be used in English regardless of whether or not the noun is singular or plural.  For clarification, we can refer to “the girl” as well as “the girls”.  As you can see, we are using the same definite article, singular or plural notwithstanding.  We also don’t have a gender to worry about; each noun receives the exact same article.  Let’s use the noun chart from the previous section to show how our article is not dependent on the noun’s gender or number:

	Singular	Plural
Masculine (n/a)	the dog	the dogs
Feminine (n/a)	the pen	the pens

English is a gender-neutral language, meaning that nouns are not classified by gender.  Since nouns are categorized by gender and number in Spanish, there is a different article for each gender and whether each gender is singular or plural.  

	Singular	Plural
Masculine	el	los
Feminine	la	las

Here is the same noun chart for the masculine noun “verbo (verb)” and feminine “bandera (flag)”, with the definite article underlined:   

	Singular	Plural
Masculine	el verbo	los verbos
Feminine	la bandera	las banderas

The Indefinite Articles

The indefinite articles are those that identify nouns in a general, usually non-tangible manner.  There are three indefinite articles in English: a, an, and some.  Remember that Spanish is a gender-specific language, so the indefinite articles depend on what noun they are associated with in the noun phrase. 

	Singular	Plural
Masculine	un teléfono	unos teléfonos
Feminine	una broma	unas bromas