[the] cats?

[raymondaliasapollyon]

Consider also "a record of financial issues of a company" vs. "a record of the financial issues of a company." It seems that the latter is exhaustive unlike the former.

 

[Skrej]

And I am not talking about proper nouns, but "Residents are up in arms about plans for a new road along the beach."
Here, "residents" refers to specific people living in a place, not just any random collection of people.

Yes, they are residents of a specific place, but it is still a reference to a generic group of people in that place. Residents of X, vs. residents of Y.


You can omit the article with plural count nouns as a generic reference.

Cats enjoy milk. (Cats in general)
The cats enjoy milk. (Specific cats that both parties are aware of)

It's very likely that in your example, there was no prior discussion (thus mutual awareness making them specific) of the residents in question. It sounds like someone making a general statement, opinion, accusation, etc.

 

[jutfrank]

What about the "resident" example? There is no definite article there, but the referents seem to be specific. Can't 'cats" behave in the same way?

In what way do you understand the referents of residents to be specific?

I think you have to be careful here of two things:

1) You have to understand exactly what you mean by the 'generic/specific' distinction.
2) You need to get away from the binary notion that referents are either generic or specific.

In my opinion it is useful to understand the generic/specific distinction as a scale of degrees rather than as one or the other. I like the term 'degree of specificity'. Look at the following noun phrases, intended to progress from a low to high degree of specificity:

cats
black cats
my black cats
the black cats of mine which you are looking at right now

In the example, Residents are up in arms, the referents of Residents are specific in that we know which town they live in, but generic in that we are not talking about every single person. What we know is that by not using an article, the speaker felt that a) it was not necessary to specify which residents he was referring to, and b) that he was making a generalisation as to their reactions to the news of a new road.

 

[raymondaliasapollyon]

Yes, they are residents of a specific place, but it is still a reference to a generic group of people in that place. Residents of X, vs. residents of Y.


You can omit the article with plural count nouns as a generic reference.

Cats enjoy milk. (Cats in general)
The cats enjoy milk. (Specific cats that both parties are aware of)

It's very likely that in your example, there was no prior discussion (thus mutual awareness making them specific) of the residents in question. It sounds like someone making a general statement, opinion, accusation, etc.

By saying "You can omit the article with plural count nouns as a generic reference," are you suggesting there is no practical difference between "Residents" and "The residents" in the example I quoted?

What about the difference between "a record of financial issues of a company"and "a record of the financial issues of a company"?

 

[Rover_KE]

This topic has been extensively covered here and in WordReference, although you have not provided a link to the other forum despite being asked.

It's probably time to move on.

 

[jutfrank]

I'm happy to answer more questions on the topic of article use if posted in a separate thread.

 

[Rover_KE]

Thank you. I'm closing this thread.