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I came across the following sentence in an article:

"There is a missing bridge between business and technology"

To the best of my understanding when a noun is used, it should have an article (a, an, the) before the noun. I found a Grammarly blog on the omission of articles, which suggested that certain nouns allow the direct use of singular nouns without an article. To me, the reason of why "business" and "technology" can be used is that they are under the special case of academic subjects. Is this correct?

Would it be correct too if I were to write it as:

"There is a missing bridge between businesses and technologies"

Another case I have in mind is this sentence:

"This allows the direct use of singular noun."

Is this correct? Or is an article ("a") needed before the word "singular"?

Another way to avoid the use of articles would be making the word to plural form (i.e. "nouns"). Is this correct?

It is my first post in StackExchange. Sorry in advance if I violate any rules or formats of posting. Thank you very much!

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  • Business and technology are complicated topics. The businesses on my street are small. New technologies appear all the time.
    – Lambie
    May 25, 2019 at 18:07

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The sentence is correct as written. The problem is you are misinterpreting the meaning of the sentence. In that sentence, the words "business" and "technology" are being used as noncount nouns.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/noncount.htm

Both "business" and "technology" can be count nouns, but as nouncount nouns, they are abstractions that mean something different than they mean as count nouns.

The term "business" as a count noun refers to a specific entity, for example:

  • Downtown, five businesses are flourishing. Only one business isn't.

The term "business" as a nouncount noun refers abstractly to the collective whole of all economic activity, for example:

  • Downtown, business is flourishing.

With that in mind, "business" in your sentence doesn't specifically refer to businesses in a concrete sense, businesses you can actually touch and feel, but rather refers abstractly and generally to the field of business, to the collective whole of all that practice providing goods or services in an attempt to make a profit. Likewise, "technology" doesn't refer to a specific technology or specific technologies but to the entire field of technology, to the collective whole of all technological development.

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  • Does that mean when using a word with a collective meaning, it has the property of a plural form, of which an article before it is not required? Following up on this, how correct is "There is a missing bridge between businesses and technologies"?
    – user313378
    Aug 22, 2018 at 16:22
  • Yes, that's what it means, but it also requires using a singular conjugation. As for how correct that suggested sentence is, it's not incorrect, but like I said before, it doesn't mean the same thing as saying "between business and technology."
    – Billy
    Aug 22, 2018 at 19:22
  • @user313378 It's more that "business" and "technology" refer to the 'worlds', 'domains' or 'communities' of business and technology rather than that they refer to 'businesses' and 'technologies'. Similar sentences would be "Overcoming the gulf between science and religion" or "Promoting cooperation between art and politics".
    – BoldBen
    May 25, 2019 at 18:51

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