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?

• True, it would not have expected to win Ribble, the fourteenth safest Tory seat in the country, nor would such a victory be essential to a general election win. _{[W2E-006 #20]}
• Indeed, the business of cataloguing what lives in these equatorial forests is still far from complete; _{[W2B-028 #35]}
• To what degree was there Frankish influence on the structures of government, and how far were they able to exercise their power within Brittany? _{[W1A-003 #33]}
• Uhm I can’t remember any specific names but they ’re usually very good in France _{[S1A-009 #42]}
• If they ’re to succeed the two men will need to make unprecedented progress dragging their three hundred pound sleds and a tiny video camera for more than ten hours a day through some of the worst conditions on the planet  _{[S2B-024 #73]}
• And how competent do you think that system is  _{[S1B-030 #112]}
• Xepe ’s coming in anyway because he ’s got to do some teaching on Monday _{[S1A-008 #168]}
• “My life was in the balance,” she recalled. _{[W2C-002 #66]}
• But uh Mr Genscher today was saying that actually what ’s happened over the Gulf as far as Europe ’s concerned only illustrates too clearly that there has to be a common foreign policy and probably a common defensive policy as well _{[S2B-013 #47]}
• But what I I do want to point out and the reason I ’m raising this in these general terms is the debilitating effect of our failure as a country to resolve the the differences between these two view points  _{[S2A-021 #43]}

Welcome!

Englicious is totally free for everyone to use!

But in exchange, we ask that you register for an account on our site.

If you’ve already registered, you can log in straight away.

Since this is your first visit today, you can see this page by clicking the button below.

CLOSE