Why do we say "there is butter on your chin", not "there is the butter on your chin"? [closed]

Now I looked at your face & I saw some butter on your chin. I know what specific butter it is.

But why do I still say "there is butter on your chin", why not "there is the butter on your chin"?

This is a question of a test.

Q36: There's ..... butter on your chin.

A: the

B: no article

Do you choose A or B?

The correct answer is B

Solution 1:

The choice of article is determined by whether or not the listener is already aware of the thing being talked about. Saying "the butter" implies that you expect the listener to already know that the butter exists; saying "some butter" (or "a bit of butter" or just "butter") implies that you're pointing out the existence of some butter that the listener was not already aware of.

The phrase "there is" is almost always used to point out the existence of something that the listener wasn't aware of, so we would almost always say "there's some butter on your chin" or "there's butter on your chin."

The only time you'd say "there's the butter on your chin" is if the listener was previously aware of the butter, but they later forgot about the butter, and you wanted to remind them about the butter. Needless to say, that would be very unusual.

Solution 2:

The simple reason is that there is nothing specific about the butter you are talking about in this case, it's just a little bit of butter, and therefore you have to treat the term "butter" as a mass noun, nouns which do not take articles. This is just as you don't say (usually) things like "You make cakes with the flour."; you have to say "with flour".

You could, however, use a determiner, which comes much to the same thing as using no determiner at all, and say this.

• There is some butter on your chin.