The aim of this book is twofold: firstly, to provide an overview of research findings on the acquisition and use of articles in English as a second language (L2); secondly, to investigate articles in L2 English from a phraseological perspective.

Learners of English as a second language are well known to experience numerous problems with mastering the article system. The extent of the problem depends heavily on the mother tongue of the learners and on other languages they may speak. Articles are particularly challenging for speakers of article-less languages such as Polish, Russian, Mandarin or Korean. Research on second language acquisition (SLA), apart from confirming that problems with articles are strongly dependent on the first language (L1), also yields several other insights: that learners’ problems are most pronounced at the beginning stages of acquisition, that the indefinite article tends to be acquired late, and that the definite article is often overused. Also, there is evidence that, for some learners, articles remain a problematic area even at advanced – possibly even native-like – levels of attainment.

No straightforward linguistic description can capture the functioning of the article system in English. A number of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors play a role in their use. Traditionally, articles are presented as elements of the morphosyntactic system of the English language, which grammaticalizes the features of countability and number. Equally important are semantic and pragmatic accounts of the use of articles, since articles encode the notions of definiteness and specificity, and play a major role in structuring information and maintaining topic continuity in discourse. The central concept behind the use of the definite article – definiteness – has a long history as a topic of investigation not only in linguistics, but also in philosophy.