I am intrigued by these three sentences in dictionaries:
- Mother and child form a close attachment.
- Physical contact between a mother and child is very important.
- Mother and son lost contact when Nicholas was in his early twenties.
Do the following rewrites sound good? Is there any difference?
- A mother and child form a close attachment.
- Physical contact between mother and child is very important.
- The mother and son lost contact when Nicholas was in his early twenties.
- The mother and the son lost contact when Nicholas was in his early twenties.
I guess sentence 5 does not work, because physical contact forces us to create the image of two subjects.
A dictionary says that “a” is used once before two nouns that are mentioned together very often, for example, “I'll fetch you a cup and saucer. Does everyone have a knife and fork?” Therefore, I guess it is not good to write “a mother and a child” in sentence 1 and 2.