Use of Definite Article “The” in Speech Has Diminished

January 27, 2015

Use of the definite article “the” has “radically” decreased over the last century according to recently published research by a linguistics professor.

Mark Liberman, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, found that the frequency of “the” in presidential State of the Union addresses has fallen from 93,201 per million words between 1790 and 1799 to 47,458 per million words between 2004 and 2013. In other words, using the presidential address as a language usage benchmark, we use “the” about half as often as we used to.

At the same time, “a/an” has increased by about a third in State of the Union addresses, Liberman wrote. But this doesn’t mean that “a/an” is replacing “the,” Liberman explains: “The behavior of a/an is less consistent, and in any case the changes are not large enough to suggest a simple trading relation between definite and indefinite reference.”

However, Liberman does think the results of his research may suggest a “decreasing formality of speech.”

“I didn’t expect to see the effect in the first place; and I’ve been surprised both by its magnitude and by the fact that it’s (so far) consistent across sources,” he said to The Guardian. “I think that one part of the explanation is a long-term trend toward greater informality in writing. But this is generally a self-renewing process, where speech styles gradually leak into writing and meanwhile continue to develop so as to maintain a distance.”

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