"On grounds of" vs. "on the grounds of"
Here's the sentence from Wall Street Journal:
...eight individuals have been deported on grounds of national security.
Instead of this, if one says,
...eight individuals have been deported on the grounds of national security.
Any difference?
Solution 1:
I can find two rules to define this :
- No article is needed before abstract nouns used in a general sense.
2.Articles are not needed in more abstract expressions of situation like to/at sea, to/at/out of work, in/out of town, in/out of office, etc.
I have a feeling that your expression on the grounds of would fit in as an abstract expression, as grounds is an abstract idea, not literally the ground.
Thus, whether or not you have the definite article doesn't matter. The meaning doesn't change, and there's no difference.
Solution 2:
A Google Ngram charting the phrases "on grounds of national" (blue line) versus "on the grounds of national" (red line) shows that both phrasings have regularly appeared in published writing for more than a century, with "on grounds of national" holding a significant (though recently lessening) advantage since 1913:
That record of usage strongly suggests that both forms are widely accepted, and I don't detect any difference in sense between them. (As an aside, I checked many of the underlying Ngram Books matches to see whether "on the grounds of national" might be enjoying inflated results owing to instances of phrases like "on the grounds of national parks"—but I didn't encounter any such complicating results; the nouns associated with both search phrases were consistently such words as interest, policy, security, defense, origin, and unity.)
Solution 3:
...[E]ight individuals have been deported on grounds of national security is correct. You can see the example sentence in Oxford advanced learner's dictionary.