Good to hear you could be refurbished.
Harry, there is a paper on that available at
http://ling.uta.edu/~laurel/stvan98_ch1.pdf (change the number for more chapters). In addition to that I noticed that those words in British where the "the" is omitted seem to be places where you go to do something specific. You go to the hospital, not because you want to visit that specific building, but to heal, you go to school to learn, to market to sell something, et cetera.