A correspondent writes to say he is puzzled by the corrections he intuitively made to a sentence from a French-speaking colleague, who wrote:
All aforementioned features appear in the same location and with the
He rewrote this as follows:
All the aforementioned features appear in the same locations and with
Is there a simple rule he can tell his colleague to follow?
It's a difficult area of grammar - with complications arising from differences between British and American usage (such as go to hospital vs go to the hospital). Large books have been written on the English article system. Certainly, there's a lot of interference from languages which follow different rules - and French is one which often uses articles where English would not (as in les informations, and suchlike).
The following sequence of examples show the basic options. Uncountable abstract nouns with generic meaning have no article: I'm studying philosophy. We do not say: I'm studying the philosophy. This applies even with premodification (Greek philosophy). If an article is used, it immediately turns the generic meaning into a specific one: I like the Greek philosophy has to mean 'the specific way of thinking found among Greeks'.
Note that when used with postmodification, the is fine, because the of-phrase in effect acts as a way of identifying a subclass, and thus changes the noun into something specific: I'm studying the philosophy of Aristotle. This only works with postmodification: premodifying genitives disallow the: we can't say I'm studying the Aristotle's philosophy.
The same point applies to plural nouns when we want to express a generic meaning. We say I'm studying trees not I'm studying the trees (that's ok if you mean the specific trees you're looking at, of course). And with postmodification the situation is as above: I'm studying the trees of Australia.
But with plurals there is a stylistic alternative: many people have no problem with I'm studying trees of Australia. This is because they're thinking of the noun phrase as a kind of professional ellipsis - like the heading you might find for a course:
Friday 10 a.m. Trees of Australia.
Friday 10 a.m. The Trees of Australia is also possible, of course.
A similar stylistic point applies to the other correction made by my correspondent: All aforementioned features became All the aforementioned features. What's happening here?
The choice is again one of generic vs specific. If the meaning is generic, the article is not used: All guests are welcome at this hotel. As soon as an article is used, a specific meaning emerges: All the guests have been accounted for. But, once again, stylistic alternatives exist. In a more elliptical style, the specific meaning obtains even without the: All guests have been accounted for.
The reason the is privileged in All the aforementioned features should now be clear. It is because the phrase is undeniably specific: features is already specific in meaning, but aforementioned makes it even more so. In addition, the is motivated by the fact that the features have evidently received some prior mention in the text (the so-called 'anaphoric' function of the definite article).
That leaves just the stylistic point. There's nothing ungrammatical about All aforementioned features appear in the same location, but I can't see any reason for introducing an elliptical style here. The word the is always a candidate for omission when a telegrammatic style is required, but then we expect all instances to go: All speakers please leave handouts on chairs. It would be stylistically incongruous to have:
All speakers please leave the handouts on chairs
All speakers please leave handouts on the chairs
All the speakers please leave the handouts on chairs
and so on. Omitting it before aforementioned but retaining it before same location is stylistically uncomfortable.
So, stylistic and semantic factors reinforce each other here, making my correspondent's addition of the an appropriate one.