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?

• And what implications does the level of aut does the level of automation have on therefore the the level of man manning and the sort of manning you require  _{[S1B-020 #163]}
• The theme was that uhm Mr Ian Scott Cooper wanted the underpinning works carried out _{[S1B-069 #71]}
• and it ’ll be taken care of and delivered at the other end  _{[S2A-028 #60]}
• Because I know what it ’s likely to call the police round _{[S1A-030 #134]}
• Mexico had the added benefit of being an oil producer as did Nigeria and they used capital from this to develop their economies. _{[W1A-015 #14]}
• What What age were you when he went in fact _{[S1A-076 #65]}
• Once started the process is likely to become regenerative, moving about the filament with the ultimate effect of moving the resistance of the device outside its acceptable operating range. _{[W2A-034 #77]}
• And the problem with that radical vision and the way it is affecting I think all the ways in which people are now trying to think about what we should be doing uh in the future is that that notion that vision is is logically it ’s logically prior to the notion of falling standards _{[S2A-021 #85]}
• The court asserted that what is protected by law is the patenting of organisms that represent the product of human ingenuity but not naturally occurring organisms _{[S2B-047 #93]}
• I think the uh mistake which the honourable gentleman makes is in assuming that uh one can automatically cut accidents and fatalities simply by increasing the number of inspectors _{[S1B-055 #12]}

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