I am confused between two sentences:
- The houses in the cities are more beautiful than that of villages.
- The houses in the cities are more beautiful than those in the villages.
Which one is more appropriate in usage?
Learn English – Correct usage of determiners and prepositions
determinersprepositions
Related Solutions
Both ways of saying it are correct. However, no. 2 is more appropriate, i think.
The is a determiner, which is, as described by Wikipedia:
a word, phrase or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common kinds of determiners include definite and indefinite articles (like the English the and a or an), demonstratives (this and that), possessive determiners (my and their), and quantifiers (many, few and several).
It is important to note that determiners modify (or, well, determine) noun phrases, which means that they don’t necessarily determine just a noun and nothing else. The entire noun phrase is under the scope of the determiner; for example:
The [big black Chevrolet that just passed by on the other side of the street]
Here, the determines not just Chevrolet, but everything inside the square brackets. A noun phrase, as you can see, can have various other things embedded into it, such as a relative clause and a locative phrase in the example above.
It can also consist of several noun phrases joined by a coordinator like and; for example:
My [mum and dad] live in Antarctica
Here, both mum and dad are clearly part of the same noun phrase, both being governed by my. If you switched the order of the two, you wouldn’t get dad and my mum, but my dad and mum.
But of course, and, being a general coordinator, can also coordinate entire noun phrases. It depends entirely on the context and the intended meaning whether an and coordinates two noun phrases inside a single noun phrase, or two main noun phrases. Very simply put: if it’s the former, then the entire thing is closely connected and perceived as a single ‘thing’: one unit. If it’s the latter, then it’s two distinct things.
In your case, there is no way to know whether table and chairs are to be seen as being closely related, effectively a single semantic unit, or whether they’re seen as separate entities that just happen to be put next to each other in the sentence.
Edwin’s first example is a good one that makes the difference clear:
The [table and chairs] cost £300.
The [table] and the [chairs] cost £300.
The first is quite clear: £300 is the total price you pay for both the table and the chairs that go with it.
The second is less so: it may mean the same, but it may also mean that the table costs £300, and the chairs cost £300 too.
This ambiguity is because even when you split something up into two distinct noun phrases, the following verb can still easily apply to both of them as one; or it can apply to them separately. This is an ambiguity you’ll just have to live with.
There is much less space for a verb to apply separately to two noun phrases if they’re embedded into a single noun phrase, which is why no one would naturally think that the total price in the first sentence was £600.
Even so, the longer each noun phrase gets, the more likely we are to separate them out as distinct noun phrases, rather than having one determiner govern over both of them—determiners are short little words, and they can have trouble governing too much.
Best Answer
As to which preposition you should use, there is no strict rule about that. However, in your example, I feel that using in the cities with of the villages creates a variation that is needless and slightly less eloquent. You are directly comparing two things (houses) in very similar situations (in cities v. villages). This kind of variation is possible, but stylistically inadvisable, so I would use the same preposition with both. If you were comparing houses in different situations, as in houses along the river are usually larger than those on mountain tops, then you have a good reason to use different prepositions, and you have no other choice anyway.
As to that (singular) v. those (plural), the pronoun should have the same number as the noun it is replacing, which could be either plural or singular, depending on what you mean. If what you mean is this:
Then you would need the singular pronoun. However, the real world makes this sentence nearly impossible, so I'm quite sure you are referring to more than one house: you can't have one house in several villages (plural) in reality. As usual, context restricts your syntactic options. So you must use those here:
As to the article (the cities and the villages), you may have a reason to use the article with one noun and no article with the other; however, I see no such reason here, and you would normally want to use articles consistently in a situation like this, so I would recommend that you use the either with both, or with neither.