[Beatrix]

Quote susan53

If you notice, all the nouns which you cite as being used without the article (collection, receipt, notification) are quite different from the others (university, history). Those in the first group all express actions - in fact, a verb has been nominalised in all cases. You could easily rewrite the phrases with a verb construction: After collecting CAI ... / We would like to inform you that we have received... / He has been notified of....

Some other examples which I've found include : We expect payment of all outstanding invoices by.... / Rectification of this fault is achieved by.../ the current standard of care for treating HCV patients involves combination of an oral form of ribavirin with...

In all cases, grammatically the article could be included. So I would hypothesise that the explanation is : when a noun is in fact a nominalised action, followed by a prepositional phrase with "of", the article is optional and often omitted.

I can't find any mention of this in any grammars or reference sources though, so it is only a hypothesis. But it seems to fit the data I've found so far. Can anybody think of any counter- examples?

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hello, I have often been puzzled by these things too. So would it be correct if we said: We expect THE payment of invoices, etc?