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Determiner, also calleddeterminative (abbreviatedDET), is a term used in some models of grammatical description to describe a word or affix belonging to a class of noun modifiers. A determiner combines with anoun to express itsreference.[1][2] Examples in English includearticles (the anda),demonstratives (this,that),possessive determiners (my,their), andquantifiers (many,both). Not all languages have determiners, and not all systems of grammatical description recognize them as a distinct category.
The linguistics term "determiner" was coined byLeonard Bloomfield in 1933. Bloomfield observed that inEnglish, nouns often require a qualifying word such as anarticle oradjective. He proposed that such words belong to a distinct class which he called "determiners".[3]
If a language is said to have determiners, any articles are normally included in the class. Other types of words often regarded as belonging to the determiner class include demonstratives and possessives. Some linguists extend the term to include other words in thenoun phrase such as adjectives and pronouns, or even modifiers in other parts of the sentence.[2]
Qualifying a lexical item as a determiner may depend on a given language's rules ofsyntax. In English, for example, the wordsmy,your etc. are used without articles and so can be regarded as possessive determiners whereas theirItalian equivalentsmio etc. are used together with articles and so may be better classed as adjectives.[4] Not all languages can be said to have a lexically distinct class of determiners.
In some languages, the role of certain determiners can be played byaffixes (prefixes or suffixes) attached to a noun or by other types ofinflection. For example, definite articles are represented by suffixes inRomanian,Bulgarian,Macedonian, andSwedish. In Swedish,bok ("book"), when definite, becomesboken ("the book"), while the Romaniancaiet ("notebook") similarly becomescaietul ("the notebook"). Some languages, such asFinnish, havepossessive affixes which play the role of possessive determiners likemy andhis.
Determiners may bepredeterminers,central determiners orpostdeterminers, based on the order in which they can occur.[citation needed] For example, "all my many very young children" uses one of each. "My all many very young children" is not grammatically correct because a central determiner cannot precede a predeterminer.
Determiners are distinguished frompronouns by the presence of nouns.[5]
Plural personal pronouns can act as determiners in certain constructions.[6]
Some theoreticians unify determiners andpronouns into a single class. For further information, seePronoun § Linguistics.
Some theoretical approaches regard determiners asheads of their ownphrases, which are described asdeterminer phrases. In such approaches, noun phrases containing only a noun without a determiner present are called "bare noun phrases", and are considered to bedominated by determiner phrases withnull heads.[7] For more detail on theoretical approaches to the status of determiners, seeNoun phrase § With and without determiners.
Some theoreticians analyzepronouns as determiners or determiner phrases. SeePronoun: Theoretical considerations. This is consistent with the determiner phrase viewpoint, whereby a determiner, rather than the noun that follows it, is taken to be the head of the phrase.
Articles are words used (as a standalone word or a prefix or suffix) to specify the grammatical definiteness of a noun, and, in some languages, volume or numerical scope. Articles often include definite articles (such as Englishthe) and indefinite articles (such as Englisha andan).
Demonstratives aredeictic words, such asthis andthat, used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They can indicate how close the things being referenced are to the speaker, listener, or other group of people. In the English language, demonstratives express proximity of things with respect to the speaker.
Possessive determiners such asmy,their,Jane’s andthe King of England’s modify a noun by attributing possession (or other sense of belonging) to someone or something. They are also known as possessive adjectives.
Quantifiers indicate quantity. Some examples of quantifiers include:all,some,many,little,few, andno. Quantifiers only indicate a general quantity of objects, not a precise number such astwelve,first,single, oronce (which are considerednumerals).[8]
Distributive determiners, also called distributive adjectives, consider members of a group separately, rather than collectively. Words such aseach andevery are examples of distributive determiners.
Interrogative determiners such aswhich,what, andhow are used to ask a question:
Manyfunctionalist linguists dispute that the determiner is a universally valid linguistic category. They argue that the concept isAnglocentric, since it was developed on the basis of the grammar of English and similar languages of north-western Europe. The linguist Thomas Payne comments that the term determiner "is not very viable as a universal natural class", because few languages consistently place all the categories described as determiners in the same place in the noun phrase.[9]
The category "determiner" was developed because in languages like English traditional categories like articles, demonstratives and possessives do not occur together. But in many languages these categories freely co-occur, asMatthew Dryer observes.[10] For instance, Engenni, a Niger-Congo language of Nigeria, allows a possessive word, a demonstrative and an article all to occur as noun modifiers in the same noun phrase:[10]
There are also languages in which demonstratives and articles do not normally occur together, but must be placed on opposite sides of the noun.[10] For instance, in Urak Lawoi, a language of Thailand, the demonstrative follows the noun:
rumah
house
besal
big
itu
that
rumah besal itu
house big that
that big house
However, the definite article precedes the noun:
koq
the
nanaq
children
koq nanaq
the children
the children
As Dryer observes, there is little justification for a category of determiner in such languages.[10]