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?

• A sort of manip _{[S1A-014 #49]}
• It ’s across the halfway line now _{[S2A-010 #204]}
• What a weirdo! _{[W1B-002 #35]}
• These details were given by the Israeli embassy in Cairo _{[S2B-009 #27]}
• There seem three such blocks of literature which could help move the case study analysis on to a more thematic basis and generate subsequent topics for discussion: (1) literature on organisational change, in both the public and private sectors; (2) the characteristics of Aids as a new issue; (3) the emergent literature on the potential impact of general management. _{[W2A-014 #20]}
• It ’s uhm It ’s a worrying amount actually of people round Christian round the council table in the Christian Union _{[S1A-068 #75]}
• Uh here there can be no difficulty about ability to pay  _{[S2A-066 #42]}
• That policy has been the victim of gross caricature over the years not least by those who claim to be its heirs _{[S2B-039 #75]}
• These results shows show that the proposed transputer/Occam combination can be expected to outperform many other combinations, although the ratio will vary by application. _{[W2A-038 #60]}
• “That large [Iraqi] army is still sitting there and it will have to be rooted out,” said General Tom Kelly at a Pentagon briefing on Friday afternoon. _{[W2E-002 #22]}

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