Determiners

Determiners form a class of words that occur in the left-most position inside noun phrases. They thus precede nouns, as well as any adjectives that may be present.

The most common determiners are the and a/an (these are also called the definite aticle and indefinite article).

Here are some more determiners:

• any taxi
• that question
• those apples
• this paper
• some apple
• whatever taxi
• whichever taxi

As these examples show, determiners can have various kinds of 'specifying' functions. For example, they can help us to identify which person or thing the noun refers to. So, if in a conversation with you I talk about that man you will know who I am talking about. In the following examples the determiners specify a quantity:

• all examples
• both parents
• many people
• each person
• every night
• several computers
• few excuses
• enough water
• no escape

Be aware that the following items belong to the class of pronouns when they occur on their own (e.g. I like this very much), but when they occur before nouns (e.g. this book) they belong to both the determiner and pronoun classes:

• this/that
• these/those

What about possessive my, your, his/her, our, and their when they occur before nouns, as in my book, her bicycle?

The National Curriculum Glossary has examples like her book in the entries for ‘possessive’, ‘pronoun' and ‘determiner’, which seems to suggest that they belong to both classes, i.e. deteminer and pronoun. In our grammar videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/engliciousgrammar), especially videos 2 and 3, we hedge our bets and say that her belongs to both classes, i.e. it’s both a determiner and a pronoun, because this is what then NC seems to be claiming. (See also 'Advanced'.) However, in the GPS tests for KS1 and KS2 it is always assumed that these words are determiners, not pronouns, despite what it says in the glossary.

The words mine, yours, his/hers, ours and theirs (e.g.That phone is mine) occur on their own and we take them to be pronouns.

Determiners can sometimes be modified themselves, usually by a preceding modifier, examples being [almost every] night and [very many] people.

Here are some more words acting as determiners. These examples are drawn directly from the ICE-GB corpus. Refreshing your screen will produce a new list of examples. Which noun does each determiner point at, and what does each determiner tell us about the noun?

• Uh Is it is it Piaget who who who said about the different stage of development _{[S1B-003 #78]}
• Well that ’s been born again as the National Heritage Memorial Fund _{[S1B-037 #17]}
• I mean he ’s got he ’s got a lot of problems at work and with the gipsies and everything hasn’t he so _{[S1A-049 #41]}
• In a reference to the Hindu claim over a mosque in the northern holy town of Iodia he asked whether religious faith could be placed above the constitution and whether India was heading towards becoming a theocratic state _{[S2B-006 #52]}
• James & Shetty (1982), reanalysing the results of that experiment, concluded that ‘the small (sic) fall in BMR per unit active tissue mass (by 16 per cent) in the first 2 weeks remains essentially unchanged for the subsequent 22 weeks of semistarvation’. _{[W2A-024 #18]}
• Mr Frisk in the middle _{[S2A-005 #2]}
• I ’m very grateful to my honourable friend for giving way _{[S1B-060 #79]}
• Instead of fertilizing the land, it is a pollutant to be disposed of - all too frequently into rivers, with disastrous consequences. _{[W2B-027 #15]}
• Add it to a specific serum which contains s specific binding protein _{[S2A-042 #81]}
• When I asked Monsieur Renan if the French government was prepared to accede to post-Gulf demands from the National Assembly in Paris that its deputies have a greater say in where and what France ’s defence manufacturers export he stopped the interview reached for his copy of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic and told me firmly that such matters were the responsibility of the administration not the parliament  _{[S2B-034 #40]}

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