Learn English – Use of articles with adjectives

adjectivesarticles

Consider the sentence

Did you see the guy in red shirt?

Is it absolutely necessary to specify a shirt or the shirt?

Best Answer

Yes, sort of. A determiner, which includes articles, has to be there. Other classes include, possessive pronouns and nouns (e.g. my, your, John's) and demonstratives (e.g. this, that). Something, often an article, has to grant that shirt a sort of relative presence in the universe. Thus the red shirt, a red shirt, John's red shirt, that red shirt -- they all work. What does not work is red shirt with no word summarizing how it fits in the universe.

I understand that certain other languages do not require determiners. Or rather, context or some grammatical structure besides determiners accomplishes the same purpose. It is difficult to imagine a language which had no way of differentiating that red shirt from Tom's red shirt from any red shirt.

Inspired by Satnam's answer, let's look at plural nouns:

Do you see boys in red shirts?

Note that neither of the plural nouns has an obvious determiner. How can that be? It would appear English sometimes uses the context of plurality to apply an invisible or assumed determiner. The words any, the, and some would be good candidates. These vary in subtle ways:

  1. Do you see any boys in any red shirts?
    The possibility exists that there are no red shirts, and perhaps not even any boys.
  2. Do you see the boys in the red shirts?
    Both boys and red shirts exist.
  3. Do you see some boys in some red shirts?
    This case has strong implications that there may be girls or adults, and that some of the boys' shirts may not be red. Neither of the first two rule out those possibilities though, nor does this case require them.

Any vagueness of meaning could have been avoided by choosing actual determiners instead of leaving it to the listener or reader to decide. But if it doesn't matter to the author/speaker, so be it.

Related Topic