It's a quite fundamental disagreement. He's a rather hard man
4) The indefinite article is placed after such and the ex-
clamatory what. When the noun is modified by an adjective, the
article precedes that adjective.
e.g. "I never heard of such a thing,"she said.
I cannot make such a categorical statement.
What a character he is!
What a dusty roadthis is!
5) The indefinite article is placed after many (and in that case
the noun is used in the singular).
e.g. He told me this many a time.
I have heard many a young girlsay that.
6) The definite article follows both, all and double,
e.g. She was ill all the timeshe was abroad.
Both theboys were late for dinner.
I offered him double the amount,but he still refused.
It is noteworthy that the use of the definite article after both
isoptional.
e.g. Both (the) menwere talking in low voices.
He signed both (the) papers.
The use of the definite article after the pronoun all is deter-
mined by the general rules.
e.g. All childrenhave to go to school one day.
All the childrenof the boarding school were in bed.
Note. Note that when both is part of the correlative conjunction both ... and, ei-
ther article may be found after it, i.e. in this case the article is chosen in accor-
dance with the general rules.
e.g. He was both a scrupulous and a kind-hearted man.
7) The definite and the indefinite articles follow half and
twice.
e.g. Half the menwere too tired to go.
It took us half an hourto settle it.
He paid twice the pricefor it.
They used to meet twice a week.
Note 1. Note the difference in meaning between twice followed by the definite
article and twice followed by the indefinite article: twice the price 'двойная цена',
twice a week 'два раза в неделю'.
Note 2. Half may serve as the first component of a compound noun. In this
case the article naturally precedes it, e.g. a half brother, a half-truth, etc.
ADJECTIVES
§ 1. Adjectives are words expressing properties and char-
acteristics of objects (e.g. large, blue, simple, clever, wooden, eco-
nomic, progressive, etc.) and, hence, qualifying nouns.
Grammatically, four features are generally considered to be
characteristic of adjectives:
1) their syntactic function of attribute,
2) their syntactic function of predicative,
3) their taking of adverbial modifiers of degree (e.g. very),
4) their only grammatical category — the degrees of com-
parison. (Adjectives in English do not change for number or case.)
However, not all adjectives possess all of the four features.
For example, Features 3 and 4 neither distinguish adjectives from
adverbs, nor are found in all adjectives.
Furthermore, there are adjectives that function both attribu-
tively and predicatively (e.g. He is my young brother. My brother
is young yet.). And there are also adjectives that function only at-
tributively (e.g. a merechild, a sheerwaste, an utterfool) or
only predicatively (e.g. glad, able, afraid, alike, alive, etc.).