Determiners and quantifiers

backnext
General and specific determiners
Determiners are words which come at the beginning of the noun phrase.
They tell us whether the noun phrase is specific or general.
Determiners are either specific or general
Specific determiners:
The specific determiners are:
the definite article: the
possessives: my, your, his, her, its; our, their, whose
demonstratives: this, that, these, those
interrogatives: which
We use a specific determiner when we believe the listener/reader knows exactly what we are referring to:
Can you pass me the salt please?
Look at those lovely flowers.
Thank you very much for your letter.
Whose coat is this?
General determiners:
The general determiners are:
a; an; any; another; other; what
When we are talking about things in general and the listener/reader does not know exactly what we are
referring to, we can use a uncount noun or a plural noun with no determiner:
Milk is very good for you. (= uncount noun)
Health and education are very important. (= 2 uncount nouns)
Girls normally do better in school than boys. (= plural nouns with no determiner)
or you can use a singular noun with the indefinite article a or an:
A woman was lifted to safety by a helicopter.
A man climbing nearby saw the accident.
We use the general determiner any with a singular noun or an uncount noun when we are talking about all of
those people or things:
Its very easy. Any child can do it. (= All children can do it)
With a full licence you are allowed to drive any car.
I like beef, lamb, pork - any meat.
We use the general determiner another to talk about an additional person or thing:
Would you like another glass of wine?
The plural form of another is other:
I spoke to John, Helen and a few other friends.
Quantifiers
We use quantifiers when we want to give someone information about the number of something: how much or
how many.
An important role in English grammar is played by determiners words or phrases that
precede a noun or noun phrase and serve to express its reference in the context. The
most common of these are the definite and indefinite articles, the and a(n). Other
determiners in English includedemonstratives such as this and that, possessives such
as my and the boy's, and quantifiers such as all, many and three.
In many contexts the presence of some determiner is required in order to form a complete
noun phrase. However, in some cases complete noun phrases are formed without any
determiner (sometimes referred to as "zero determiner" or "zero article"), as in the
sentence Apples are fruit. Determiners can also be used in certain combinations, as in my
many friends or all the chairs.

Noun phrases with and without determiners[edit]
In some languages, including English, noun phrases are required to be "completed" with
a determiner in many contexts, and thus a distinction is made in syntactic analysis
between phrases that have received their required determiner (such as the big house),
and those in which the determiner is lacking (such as big house).
The situation is complicated by the fact that in some contexts a noun phrase may
nonetheless be used without a determiner (as in I like big houses); in this case the phrase
may be described as having a "null determiner". (Situations in which this is possible
depend on the rules of the language in question; for English, see English articles.)
In the original X-bar theory, the two respective types of entity are called noun phrase (NP)
and N-bar (N, N). Thus in the sentence Here is the big house, both house and big
house are N-bars, while the big house is a noun phrase. In the sentence I like big houses,
both houses and big houses are N-bars, but big houses also functions as a noun phrase
(in this case without an explicit determiner).
In some modern theories of syntax, however, what are called "noun phrases" above are no
longer considered to be headed by a noun, but by the determiner (which may be null), and
they are thus called determiner phrases (DP) instead of noun phrases. (In some accounts
that take this approach, the constituent lacking the determiner that called N-bar above
may be referred to as a noun phrase.)
This analysis of noun phrases is widely referred to as the DP hypothesis. It has been the
preferred analysis of noun phrases in the minimalist program from its start (since the early
1990s), though the arguments in its favor tend to be theory-internal. By taking the
determiner, a function word, to be head over the noun, a structure is established that is
analogous to the structure of the finite clause, with a complementizer. Apart from the
minimalist program, however, the DP hypothesis is rejected by most other modern theories
of syntax and grammar, in part because these theories lack the relevant functional
categories.
[4]
Dependency grammars, for instance, almost all assume the traditional NP
analysis of noun phrases.
For illustrations of different analyses of noun phrases depending on whether the DP
hypothesis is rejected or accepted, see the next section.
A noun phrase or nominal phrase (abbreviated NP) is a phrase which has
a noun (or indefinite pronoun) as its head word, or which performs the same grammatical
function as such a phrase.
[1]
Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they
may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.
Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects, as predicative expressions, and
as the complements of prepositions. Noun phrases can be embedded inside each other;
for instance, the noun phrase some of his constituents contains the shorter noun
phrase his constituents.
In some modern theories of grammar, noun phrases with determiners are analyzed as
having the determiner rather than the noun as their head; they are then referred to
as determiner phrases.
Identifying noun phrases[edit]
Some examples of noun phrases are underlined in the sentences below. The head noun
appears in bold.
The election year politics are annoying for many people.
Almost every sentence contains at least one noun phrase.


"Those five beautiful shiny Arkansas Black apples sitting on the chair" is a noun phrase of
which apples is the head. To test, a single pronoun can replace the whole noun phrase, as in "They
are delicious".
Current economic weakness may be a result of high energy prices.
Noun phrases can be identified by the possibility of pronoun substitution, as is
illustrated in the examples below.
a. This sentence contains two noun phrases.
b. It contains them.
a. The subject noun phrase that is present in this sentence is long.
b. It is long.
a. Noun phrases can be embedded in other noun phrases.
b. They can be embedded in them.
A string of words that can be replaced by a single pronoun without rendering the
sentence grammatically unacceptable is a noun phrase. As to whether the string
must contain at least two words, see the following section.