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Kakabi Posted 14 years ago
Grammar
An ARTICLE question which always puzzles me...
All I want is a grammatical answer.
We normally distribute articles to singular countable nouns as the following:
"I have an eraser, a pencil, a pen and a ruler in my pencil case."
However, is it GRAMMATICAL to omit subsequent articles in this case? What i mean is just leaving the first article "an" there and omitting the three subsequent "a-s" because "an" can already represent the singular nature of all subsequent nouns.
"I have an eraser, pencil, pen and ruler in my pencil case."
I post similar questions in other forums before. Some said YES and some said NO. I had stuck to the NO camp who said that it was necessary to give an article to EACH NOUN so that people know how many that particular thing(s) has/have. However, recently I spotted opposite examples even from newspapers, lifestyle magazines and dictionaries.
Hope some grammar experts can give a hand.
We normally distribute articles to singular countable nouns as the following:
"I have an eraser, a pencil, a pen and a ruler in my pencil case."
However, is it GRAMMATICAL to omit subsequent articles in this case? What i mean is just leaving the first article "an" there and omitting the three subsequent "a-s" because "an" can already represent the singular nature of all subsequent nouns.
"I have an eraser, pencil, pen and ruler in my pencil case."
I post similar questions in other forums before. Some said YES and some said NO. I had stuck to the NO camp who said that it was necessary to give an article to EACH NOUN so that people know how many that particular thing(s) has/have. However, recently I spotted opposite examples even from newspapers, lifestyle magazines and dictionaries.
Hope some grammar experts can give a hand.
Top answer
" Both of these are acceptable English.
- " Both of these are acceptable English.
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1 Answers
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kakabi"I have an eraser, a pencil, a pen and a ruler in my pencil case."
kakabi"I have an eraser, pencil, pen and ruler in my pencil case."Both of these are acceptable English.
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