Are there any circumstances when the article 'a' is used before the word 'answer'?

Question

Generally, we use the article "an" before the word "answer", because it starts with the sound of a vowel. But "a" is also used before this word:

1. Above all things never show an inmate fear or your uncertainty of a situation! If you don't know a answer say "No" because it's easier to switch a no to a yes then a yes to a no later. And whatever you do, don't panic and stay firm on your answer. — Matthew Zamborowski

2. The problem is that Trump isn’t enough of a answer-avoiding politician, said Carson.

My question is, are there any circumstances when "a" is used before the word "answer" instead of "an"?

Are the above cited uses of "a" correct?

Answer 1

In the dialect called "standard English", an is used before words that start with vowel sounds. This includes the word answer. The use of a answer is not in accordance with standard English.

It is possible that one, or even both, of the usages that you have found of a answer is a typographical error (or 'typo') for an answer. However, you should also know that in some dialects of English other than "standard English," the use of a before a word that begins with a vowel sound is acceptable. This is true in dialects found in both the USA and the UK.

For example, see the ELU Question A tendency to use “a” in place of “an” in American English.

For usage in the cosmopolitan city of London, England, see A Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Study of Indefinite Article Forms in London English (brought to my attention by snailplane), which "reports on the analysis of the use of indefinite article forms (a/an) in front of vowel sounds in spoken London English" (my emphasis).

My point is that some native speakers do use a and not an before words that start with a vowel sound. This is a legitimate variation, and not a "typo." The only, actual, universal "rule" regarding the use of a / an is what native speakers feel comfortable saying. One or two hundred years ago, an university was the norm; today it is a university. Even today, some speakers say an hundred.

So, you shouldn't be surprised when you come across such usages as

The problem is that Trump isn’t enough of a answer-avoiding politician, said Carson.

(The Guardian)

They may be a typo, or they may be an accurate written representation of what the person would have said in spoken English.

You have asked specifically about a answer, but this usage is the same as a before other words, such as a apple. (It is easy to find examples in Google Books of a apple; it is much more time consuming to find additional examples (besides the two you found) of a answer because of the connection between the letter a and answer keys.)

The following piece mentions that a apple is found in AAVE (African American Vernacular English).

Evaluation of a Code-switching Composition Curriculum for Students who Speak ...

Again, see The Adventures of Harry Richmond (Complete) (1924) for three instances of a apple and Such Was the Season (2003) for two more examples of a apple.

This is authentic English, which often does not conform to the dialect called "standard English.

Answer 2

Usually the community would close this question as "based on a typo", but I think it warrants an answer.

You are correct in stating that before words starting with a vowel sound, a changes to an. That rule has not been suspended, not generally and not for a single word, even if you found two unrelated counter-examples before "answer".

Google Ngram confirms it:

We may further assume that the books in the Google books corpus are better spellchecked than some random articles on the web - quickly written, even quicker forgotten.

Especially the second one, a transcript of a live event. Those need to be written fast and as humans are involved often contain minor typos that the random reader will either not notice or ignore, especially as it does not change the general meaning.

Conclusion: You found two typos.

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But thanks a lot for the interesting question!

Answer 3

[Addendum: @AlanCarmack points out that this was a paraphrase, not an actual quote from spoken usage. So, in fact, it may have been a mistake on the part of the Guardian author. It's possible that the author was writing the paraphrased quote as he thought it would have been spoken, but this is probably a stretch.]

"The problem is that Trump isn’t enough of a answer-avoiding politician, said Carson."

This is not an error or a typo, but an intentional usage in standard spoken English.

The purpose of using "a" instead of "an" here, when speaking out loud, is to help the listener parse the sentence correctly in real time, as it's being heard.

There's probably a slight glottal stop (or at least a momentary break) between "a" and "answer". In contrast, "answer-avoiding" is pronounced continuously in one breath.

The speaker wants to avoid a likely real-time mis-parsing of "an answer" as a syntactic unit, the putative object of the preposition "of"; the listener would then have to re-parse quickly after hearing the rest of the sentence, after "answer".

The use of "a", with a glottal stop afterward, makes it clear, as the listener is hearing it, that the noun phrase that the indefinite article applies to isn't just "answer", but is something longer (which turns out to be "answer-avoiding politician").

I don't know how much research has been done on this phenomenon, but here's one source: The Glottal Stop in English: A Descriptive Study, by Majda Sabri Faris. This paper states:

"Prosodically, a glottal stop or a glottal approximant may in many languages including English be used for emphasizing the next word or a prosodic boundary. Word-initial vowels are more frequently glottalized (i.e., glottal stops or approximants are produced) at major prosodic boundaries (Pierrehumbert and Talkin 1992:112)."

The bibliographic reference given there is to: Pierrehumbert, J. and Talkin, D. (1992), "Lenition of /h/ and glottal stop", in: Docherty and D.R. Ladd, eds., Papers in Laboratory Phonology II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 90-117 (which I unfortunately don't have access to).