Of course. No dispute. But in both your examples the use of an article (definite or indefinite) does lot of signalling, too.
If I made a ‘path to sidewalk’ or ‘bridge to island’ then I’d expect sidewalk and island to be verbs - which obviously would in turn need an object. They’re not verbs so ‘build a bridge to island the object being a noun I want to connect with a bridge’ makes no sense.
Apparently Disqus dislikes us replying to each other so many times and I need to ‘encourage everyone to get involved in the conversation’. Probably best not, I suspect.
