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?

• I think it ’s the money _{[S1A-083 #111]}
• The tables are probably the biggest problem because don’t forget you do this  _{[S2A-058 #87]}
• I was saying the other day how on earth did you get it to be so big  _{[S1A-039 #224]}
• Uhm I saw Heidi get out go and get a drink and I saw her climb in miss the step and then it was just lot of commotion after that getting her out  _{[S1B-066 #164]}
• A teat location system is therefore required, and the robot must be able to track, or to compensate for, the movements of the cow. _{[W2A-033 #41]}
• Access will be faster than for conventional Compact Cassette, because the search head scans both sectors of the tape simultaneously, and switches from sector to sector. _{[W2B-038 #75]}
• Because it ’s going to be an arty film almost certainly because you like arty films and Xepe likes arty films _{[S1A-006 #84]}
• ; add the tomato mixture, and cook, stirring regularly for at least 10 minutes. _{[W2D-020 #120]}
• But it does not define or describe the policing function _{[S2B-037 #93]}
• The ideas of the Enlightenment it was believed could be propagated among the Jewish masses of central Europe only by means of a didactic literature which had no choice but to employ Yiddish  _{[S2B-042 #54]}

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