Articles with "mom and dad."

Community-Created Courses English (British)
1

What do you think, which of the following are not grammatical and why?

  1. I have mom and dad
  2. I have a mom and dad
  3. I have a mom and a dad
  4. I have the mom and dad
  5. I have the mom and the dad
  6. I have a mom and the dad
2

Why are you asking? Do you need an answer or is this just for fun? Proper grammar is a pain in the neck. Most native english speakers butcher it, including myself :grimacing:

Here is my interpretation:

  1. Is correct but incomplete e.g. “I have Mom and Dad on the phone.” Though I suppose technically it is grammatically incorrect given that the pronouns require capitalization as used here if the mom and dad being referred to belong to the speaker.
  2. Not sure how this weighs on the grammar scale, people would say it though.
  3. This one is correct assuming you are not picky about fullstops/periods at the end of a sentence.
  4. This one is tricky, you wouldn’t say it in reference to your own parents. There are situations where someone might say this and it be correct to say, though not necessarily correct to write. Say the police have found a missing child. An officer is on the phone and turns to the policeman in charge of finding the child’s parents, he might then say, “I have the mom and dad,” as in I have the mom and dad, of the missing child, on the phone.
  5. This could be a valid statement, or answer to the right question.
  6. This could also be a valid statement or answer in the right circumstances. The mom is not the mother of the child in question but the dad is the father of the child. Perhaps the mom was concerned for the child even though it is not her child :wink:
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3

Thank you @avyva for the great explanations! I need this, because I want to speak properly. I have hard times with articles, because my native language does not have them. It is just unbelievable how hard it can be to get simple sentences like these right (considering possible contexts and meanings).

Would you say that 2. and 3. have the same meaning?

What if there are more than two items in the enumeration. For example, “I have a chair, table, and sofa.” Is it better to say “I have a chair, a table, and a sofa?”

4

Both 2 and 3 have the same meaning. Your two enumeration examples also have the same meaning, and are both correct, although to me “I have a chair, a table, and a sofa” sounds just a little more natural than “I have a chair, table, and sofa”. The latter sounds more informal.

As you can see in avyva’s explanations, there are situations for each of those examples where they would be correct. But there’s no situation where all six would be correct simultaneously… because they don’t all quite mean the same thing. For example…

To the question: “What family members do you have?”, only #2 and #3 would be grammatically correct. The other ones would be incorrect.

If one of your siblings asked you “Do you know where Mom and Dad are?”, only #1 would be grammatically correct. The rest would be incorrect.

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5

I feel your pain. I am trying to learn french and feel like I will never make sense of it.

AndrewFM seems to have covered your questions very nicely, so good luck on your learning journey.

1 Like
6

Thank you so much! it’s a good question. I also gave you a lingot on Duolingo. (Turkish from English discussion)

7

Thanks @BlueBooks! :slight_smile: