Het Lidwoord Van Bepaaldheid: Foutenanalyse en Contrastief Onderzoek Spaans-Nederlands

The study reported here was sparked off by the intuitive feeling that the errors made by Dutch students in the use of the definite article in Spanish are due to an incorrect notion of the generic article. The results of a Spanish-Dutch contrastive analysis are presented, as well as an analysis of errors made by Dutch and Spanish subjects in four translation and blanks tests. Grammar books, in describing the generic system, tend to pay attention only to the use of the article in subject position. Our analysis indicate that more attention should be paid to the use of the article in co-ordinated subjects and objects, and in active and passive sentences.