The Definite Article: The Anaphoric Use (I)

¿What is an article? According to the book "Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española de la Real Academia Española", the article belongs to a type of words of grammatical nature which is used to point out the noun´s type of reference. This definition is something we can easily apply to other languages with articles such as English, French, Italian, German, etc. Then again, the article is something that can feel very natural for those native speakers but it is actually a concept with deep complexity. And that we can realize while teaching our language (with articles) to students whose native language lacks of them. Quite often my students (Koreans) get confused between the articles, some even avoid using them, changing completely the meaning of the sentence or even making impossible the communication. Because, in general terms, it is not the same "I bought a cot/crib" than "I bought the cot/crib".

On this entry I will write about about the definite article in a simplified way and about its most common use in the Spanish language: The Anaphoric one. Let´s take a look on the next example:

- A) Ayer mi madre compró un nuevo ordenador. La tarjeta gráfica no es muy buena pero la de sonido es fantástica

In this example we have two definite articles: la tarjeta gráfica and la de sonido. Why? Because both of them refer to a previous element of the discourse: un nuevo ordenador. This is what is called the Anaphoric use of the definite article; to be more specific: of associative relation.

There is also the Anaphoric use of direct relation:

- B) Quiere comprarse un escritorio para guardar sus memorias, una casa para guardar el escritorio y un jardín para guardar la casa.

In this example we can see that we use first the indefinite article with escritorio and casa (first mention indefinite article) and then we repeat those nouns along the definite article. Why? Because the addressee knows already which escritorio and casa are we talking about.

As we can see both the direct and the associative relation of the Anaphoric use refer to an element of the discourse previously mentioned. This is called Punto de Anclaje/Anclado (Anchor´s point) that in "A´s" example would be un nuevo ordenador and in "B´s" example un escritorio and una casa.

These are the basic and general concepts of the Anaphoric use of the definite article in Spanish. In the next entry we will discuss another types of anaphoric uses.