Determiner
A determiner is a word that precedes a noun to introduce it or to specify its reference. It helps to clarify whether the noun is specific or general, and can also indicate quantity. Examples of determiners include articles (the, a, an), demonstratives (this, that), possessives (my, your), and quantifiers (some, many).
8 Key excerpts on "Determiner"
- David Waugh, Kate Allott, Eve English, Rosemary Waugh, Elizabeth Bulmer(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Learning Matters(Publisher)
...16 Determiners What do I need to know? A Determiner is a word used to give more information about a noun by defining it as something specific or something of a particular type. The words that can fulfil this function may be articles, demonstratives, possessive Determiners or quantifiers. The definite article ‘the’ refers to a specific person, place or thing. For example: The doctor who saved my life. The dog I ran over last week. The avenue I live in. The indefinite articles ‘a’ and ‘an’ refer to any person, place or thing. ‘An’ is used before a word beginning with a vowel sound. For example: A doctor can save your life. A dog can be a good pet. An avenue is a kind of street. But note that some words which begin with ‘u’ have a consonant sound and so we tend to use ‘a’ with them. For example: a useless watch a uniform a Ukrainian ‘Some’ is used as the plural form of the indefinite article. For example: Some dogs are very noisy. For lots of activities and ideas for teaching about Determiners, see https://sites.google.com/site/easygrammar4kids/a-an Demonstratives A demonstrative Determiner is one which emphasises that a particular noun is being referred to (e.g. ‘this evening’, ‘those trainers’). There are four demonstrative Determiners in English: ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’ and ‘those’. Demonstrative Determiners can also be used as demonstrative pronouns. When they are used as Determiners, they are followed by the nouns they modify. Compare: This house is mine. (demonstrative used as a Determiner modifying the noun ‘house’) This is my house. (demonstrative used as a pronoun) Possessives Possessive Determiners, or possessive adjectives, refer to nouns by telling who they belong to...
eBook - ePub- R.L. Trask, Peter Stockwell(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Determiner The part of speech which includes words like the and my. The English Determiners are a smallish class of chiefly grammatical items which have only a single function: they typically occur as the first item in a noun phrase. Here is a simple test for Determiners. Any single word which can fit into the blank in the following frame to produce a noun phrase is a Determiner: – new book. Examples: the, a, this, that, some, every, no, my, her, which. There are some further Determiners which can only fit into plural noun phrases, as in: – new books. Examples: these, most, both, all, few, several. But be careful here: certain words which are not Determiners will also fit into this second blank (entirely, attractive, other), but these items require entirely different syntactic structures to fit into this string of words. The two most highly grammatical Determiners, the and a (n), are called articles. The ones like my and her are traditionally called possessive pronouns, but grammatically they are Determiners, not pronouns. Normally a noun phrase contains only one Determiner. But certain noun phrases appear to contain two: all my children, both these books. In such cases, the first item is often called a preDeterminer. A noun phrase which is headed by a singular uncountable noun or by any plural noun need not have an overt Determiner: French wine, new books. Some linguists prefer to say that such noun phrases contain a zero Determiner. Some (not all) Determiners have meanings involving quantity, such as many, severa l and all. These are called quantifiers, and some linguists prefer to separate the quantifiers into a separate part of speech from Determiners, but there is little or no grammatical justification for this. See also : noun phrase Further reading : Collins Cobuild 1990; Greenbaum and Quirk 1990; Jackson 2002....
eBook - ePubTeaching Grammar through Literature
Bringing Language to Life in the Secondary Classroom
- Anna McGlynn, Rachel Fenn(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...4 Determiners In simplest terms, Determiners modify nouns. They can be both referring or quantifying, so telling us whom the noun belongs to, where it is, and how many of them there are. Determiners always come before a noun or noun phrase and are often ignored entirely as being insignificant. However, a good understanding of the types of Determiners that exist and what they signify can add a great deal to students’ analyses of literature. Determiners can take several forms. Referral Determiners are: Articles Articles are a/an and the. ‘A/an’ is known as the indefinite article because it is not referring to anything specific, and ‘the’ is known as the definitive article because it is referring to something specific. For example: I bought an ice-cream. There is no specification of which type of ice-cream, so this is an indefinite article. If we wanted to make the article definite we would need to change the sentence to: I bought the ice-cream with sprinkles. This time we need the definite article because we are referring to a specific type of ice-cream, as opposed to the many others available to us. Possessives Possessive Determiners are my, your/s, her/s, his, its, our/s and their. Possessive Determiners and pronouns are possible to tell apart in a sentence by looking at their role. Pronouns replace full noun phrases; possessive Determiners come before the noun to tell us to whom it belongs. For example: Don’t touch that coat! It’s ours ! Here ‘ours’ is a pronoun, because it replaces the noun entirely. She brought her coat. Here ‘her’ is a possessive Determiner because it describes the noun, telling us whom the noun belongs to. Demonstratives Demonstrative Determiners are this, that, these and those. They allow us to explain which specific noun we are referring to and whether it is close to us (this, these) or further away (that, those)...
eBook - ePubGrammar, Meaning, and Concepts
A Discourse-Based Approach to English Grammar
- Susan Strauss, Parastou Feiz, Xuehua Xiang(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Our use of one noun over others, of a particular Determiner or Determiner type, or of a pronoun instead of a noun depends on how specific we want or need our discourse to be. Our choice depends on what our hearers or readers may know or not know about our topic. And it depends on the degrees of specificity, precision, or vagueness that we want to invoke as we represent our referents in all of our daily discourse. 4.2 English Determiners and Their Conceptual Meanings The meanings of Determiners in English all center around the following narrow concepts: identifiability, specificity degrees of focus [low, medium, high] possession and possession-like or affiliative relationships dender [with third-person singular possessive Determiners only] sequence and order number and quantity [including part/whole relationships] irrelevance of any of the foregoing concepts [represented by ∅ as the covert Determiner] To illustrate, compare the possible grammatical variations on the following Virginia Woolf title, To the Lighthouse, and see how the conceptual imageries of the nouns change as the Determiners change...
eBook - ePubFrench Creoles
A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar
- Anand Syea(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 3 Determiners 3.0 Introduction This chapter discusses the following members of the Determiner class: the indefinite Determiner, the definiteness and specificity Determiner, the demonstrative Determiner, and the possessive Determiner. It begins with a brief outline of Determiners in English and French and then discusses the Determiners in the different French creoles. The discussion focuses on the similarities and differences between these creoles in their choice of words to express definiteness and specificity, deixis, and possession. This chapter also discusses the loss of the French articles in the French creoles and the syntax and semantics of their definiteness and specificity marker. 3.1 General Bare count nouns are impossible in a language like English except when they are in their plural form: She reads stories to children/*child, Children/*child like stories. In the singular, count nouns have to be accompanied by a Determiner, either the indefinite article a(n) or the definite article the, or a demonstrative this/that, or a possessive your, or a quantifier every : She is reading a story to a child. This child likes her stories, Your child likes her stories, Every child likes a good story. Without the Determiner, a singular count noun is simply impossible: * She is reading story to child, * Child likes her stories, * Child likes good story. Such a restriction also applies to nouns in French – interestingly, not only to singular nouns but also to plural ones. In the French creoles, this restriction on singular nouns can sometimes be relaxed depending on context. The Determiners in English, as in French, occupy pre-nominal position, and they can be separated from the noun they specify by one or more adjectives: a/the/this/your/every big black dog. They are also mutually exclusive: * a/the this book, * a/the my book, * an/the every book * that my book, * that every book * my every book, * every my book...
eBook - ePub- Roger Hawkins, Richard Towell(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 Determiners For the purposes of this grammar, the term 'Determiner' refers to three classes of items that modify nouns: Articles : definite, indefinite and partitive Demonstrative Determiners Possessive Determiners Each class functions in different (but sometimes overlapping) ways with the others to specify the status of the entity or concept referred to by the noun in the discourse. Definite articles indicate that the entity/concept referred to by the noun is uniquely identifiable by both speaker and hearer. If you say Passe-moi la fourchette ‘Pass me the fork’, both speaker and hearer know that there is a unique, identifiable ‘fork’ in the context in which the conversation is taking place. Indefinite articles are used with count nouns (bouteille ‘bottle’, billet ‘ticket’) and indicate that the entity/concept referred to by the noun is not sufficiently ‘known about’ or ‘specified’ to justify the definite article. If you say Passe-moi une fourchette ‘Pass me a fork’, this implies there is no uniquely identifiable ‘fork’ in the context of the conversation (perhaps because there are several of them). Partitive articles (du, de la, des) serve the same function as indefinite articles, but are used with mass and abstract nouns: J’ai acheté du lait ‘I bought (some) milk’, Il faut avoir de la patience ‘You must have (some) patience’. The plural partitive article des is used with nouns that are mass or abstract by virtue of their meaning, but happen to be grammatically plural: des tripes (fpl) ‘tripe’, des cheveux (mpl) ‘hair’, des renseignements (mpl) ‘information’. Demonstratives are the forms ce/cet, cette, ces ‘this/these, that/those’...
eBook - ePub- Martin Durrell, Katrin Kohl, Claudia Kaiser, Gudrun Loftus(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 The Noun Phrase: Determiners and Pronouns A NOUN PHRASE can simply consist of a single noun on its own, e.g. Rache ist süß, or of a PRONOUN, which ‘stands for’ a noun, e.g. Sie ist süß. As in English, a noun is often preceded by a Determiner such as the following: ♦ an ARTICLE – der (‘the’) or ein (‘a’) ♦ a DEMONSTRATIVE such as dieser (‘this’) ♦ a POSSESSIVE such as mein (‘my’) or dein (‘your’) ♦ an INTERROGATIVE such as welcher (‘which’) or wie viele (‘how many’). Between the Determiner and the noun you may find one or more ADJECTIVES (see chapter 4) or even long adjectival phrases (quite unlike anything in English) that give additional information about the noun: dieser tolle. neue Film this brilliant new film Der 1867 von dem schwedischen Chemiker Alfred Nobel erfundene und kurz darauf für die Erbauung des Gotthard-Tunnels benutzte Sprengstoff heißt Dynamit. The explosive invented in 1867 by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel and used shortly afterwards for the construction of the Gotthard Tunnel is called dynamite. Determiners play an important part in indicating the role of the noun phrase in the sentence. To do this they have endings that show GENDER (i.e. masculine, feminine or neuter), NUMBER (i.e. singular or plural) and CASE (i.e. nominative, accusative, genitive or dative). Similarly, the form of pronouns changes depending on their role in the sentence. In order to understand German properly, and to produce sentences that mean what you want to say and can be fully understood, you need to learn these forms and pay attention to the endings in their context. This chapter gives you details about the following: ♦ definite and indefinite ARTICLES (3.1–3.3) ♦ other DeterminerS (3.4–3.6) ♦ PRONOUNS, especially PERSONAL PRONOUNS and REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS (3.7–3.9). 3.1 The definite article The definite article (= English ‘the’) has different forms in German to show the GENDER, NUMBER and CASE of the noun it is used...
- Josep Quer, Roland Pfau, Annika Herrmann, Josep Quer, Roland Pfau, Annika Herrmann(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In the non-specific reading, none of the participants in the context may identify it. Although specificity is not overtly marked in the English Determiner system, it has observable effects on co-reference. In English, the kind of co-referential pronoun disambiguates the two possible readings (Partee 1970). Under the specific reading, the indefinite NP ‘a book’ refers to an identifiable book (2a). Under the non-specific reading, Joana is looking for an element of the kind ‘syntax book’, but there is not any particular book that the sender has in mind when uttering (2b). (1) a. The book that we read last month was about definiteness. b. Next month, we will read a book about definiteness. (2) Joana wants to read a book about syntax … a. but she cannot find it. b. but she cannot find one. The range of NP types that have definiteness as part of their meaning include Determiners (the English definite article the), demonstratives (this, that, those), proper nouns (Joana, Martí), possessives (my, your, her), and personal pronouns (you, she, they). Indefiniteness is encoded with the indefinite Determiner in languages that have one (for instance, English a), generic ontological-category nouns (such as someone, something, somewhere in English), interrogative pronouns (such as neaq-naa ‘somebody/who’ and qway ‘something/what’ in Khmer (Haspelmath 1997: 27)), one-based definite particles (English one, French on, German man), cardinals, and quantifiers (such as most, many). From a theoretical point of view, definiteness is usually associated with uniqueness and familiarity. On the one hand, uniqueness approaches are built on the insight that a definite description is used to refer to entities that have a role or a property which is unique (Kadmon 1990; Abbott 1999)...
