Structure and function What time and location do you associate with the clause for Madonna to write a novel? There's no answer to that: no time, no place. It hasn't happened, anywhere; it might never happen; though in principle it could. But the thing is, the construction isn't designed to tie down the situation to a time and place. The ‘for NP to VP’ construction is non-finite in the sense of having no temporal or spatial bounds, the way infinity has no temporal or spatial bounds. That's the way the traditional notions ‘finite’ and ‘non-finite’ arose.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/nonfiniteclauses.html
Please explain to me the use of "the" before "situation" and "a" before "time and place"?
Are you sure you still don't understand how English uses the articles "a(n)" and "the"? com/blog/articles/
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Are you sure you still don't understand how English uses the articles "a(n)" and "the"?
Have you done any basic research such as looking on the Internet, such as here?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article (grammar)
or here: