Аннотация:Summary. When students in higher educational institutions
translate the titles of their course works, undergraduate theses
and dissertations into English, problems relating to the use of
articles (definite, indefinite and zero) are, currently, of paramount
importance. An analysis of the titles of more than 2000 pieces of
academic work written by undergraduate and masters humanities
students in the fields of politics and philosophy has allowed us to
elucidate the typical errors which students make when using articles.
The style of the academic title frequently requires the inclusion of such
lexical units as ‘analysis’, ‘interpretation’, ‘survey’ et cetera; when using
these words, students often pick the incorrect article. In the title of the
academic work, the student introduces key concepts and may abstract
several words which they are to use as terms. This creates a particular
difficulty when it comes to article usage. Students all too frequently
miss out the definite article before nouns which are grammatically
independent and are followed by a more specific nominal phrase,
or, on the contrary, add an unnecessary ‘the’ before nouns used in an
abstract sense. This article shall conduct an analysis of these errors
and shall offer recommendations which will be of help to students
in their use of articles when composing the titles of their academic
work and in preparation for presentations given in English, the lingua
franca of international scholarly communication.
Keywords: students’ academic work, indefinite article, definite article,
zero article, terminology, substantivized adjectives, verbal nouns.