Phrasal Settings in Which the Definite and Indefinite Articles Appear to Be Interchangeable in English: An Exploratory Study

This paper investigates the fact that some English phrases may be used with either the definite or the indefinite article, without any obvious change in meaning or effect. Whereas many types of phrasal variation have been documented in the literature, there is little description of this particular phenomenon. Examples are given of a number of phrasal types, ranging from opaque idiomatic expressions to fairly transparent word strings. Contextualized examples are provided, mainly from the British National Corpus but also from corpus-based reference works.