English determiners
[5]: 74 Others, such as The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), make the opposite terminological choice.
That is, determinatives add abstract meanings to the noun phrase, such as definiteness, proximity, number, and the like.
Traditional grammar has no concept to match determiners, which are instead classified as adjectives, articles, or pronouns.
Linguist and historian Peter Matthews observes that the assumption that determiners are distinct from adjectives is relatively new, "an innovation of … the early 1960s.
If, therefore, Old English authors want to make nouns preceded by possessive pronouns determinative, they add the definite article.
[10]: 45 In 1933, Leonard Bloomfield introduced the term determiner used in this article, which appears to define a syntactic function performed by "limiting adjectives".
"[5]: 71 This analysis was developed in a 1962 grammar by Barbara M. H. Strang[5]: 73 and in 1972 by Randolph Quirk and colleagues.
[5]: 74 In 1985, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language appears to have been the first work to explicitly conceive of determiner as a distinct lexical category.
But a student at MIT named Paul Abney proposed, in his PhD dissertation about English noun phrases (NPs) in 1987, that the head was not the noun ball but the determiner the, so that the red ball is a determiner phrase (DP).
[15] The main similarity between adjectives and determiners is that they can both appear immediately before nouns (e.g., many/happy people).
[1]: 356 Adjectives can function as a predicative complement in a verb phrase (e.g., that was lovely), but determiners typically cannot (e.g., *that was every).
[1]: 56 Morphologically, adjectives often inflect for grade (e.g., big, bigger, biggest), while few determiners do.
[1]: 356 Finally, adjectives can typically form adverbs by adding -ly (e.g., cheap → cheaply), while determiners cannot.
[1]: 539 Alternatively, Bas Aarts offers three reasons to support the analysis of many as an adjective.
[1]: 57 The words you and we share features commonly associated with both determiners and pronouns in constructions such as we teachers do not get paid enough.
On the one hand, the phrase-initial position of these words is a characteristic they share with determiners (compare the teachers).
[16]: 125 These characteristics have led linguists and grammarians like Ray Jackendoff and Steven Paul Abney to categorize such uses of we and you as determiners.
[19][13][1]: 374 On the other hand, these words can show case contrast (e.g., us teachers), a feature that, in Modern English, is typical of pronouns but not of determiners.
This analysis is supported by the fact that other pre-head modifiers of adjectives that "intensify" their meaning tend to be adverbs, such as awfully in awfully sorry and too in too bright.
[1]: 431 Comparative determiners like fewer or more can take than prepositional phrase (PP) complements (e.g., it weighs [less than five] grams).
In the clause many would disagree, the determiner many is the fused determinative-head in the NP that functions as the subject.
[1]: 332 In many grammars, both traditional and modern, and in almost all dictionaries, such words are considered to be pronouns rather than determiners.
For example, the articles a and the have more in common with each other than with the demonstratives this or that, but both belong to the class of determiner and, thus, share more characteristics with each other than with words from other parts of speech.
[1]: 356 This group also includes a few and a little,[1]: 391 and Payne, Huddleston, and Pullum argue that once, twice, and thrice also belong here, and not in the adverb category.
[29] They also add distributive meaning; that is, "they pick out the members of a set singly, rather than considering them in mass.
They also convey existential quantification, meaning that they assert the existence of a thing in a quantity greater than zero.
Neither also conveys this kind of meaning but is only used when selecting from a set of exactly two, which is why neither is typically classified as disjunctive rather than negative.
General norms of cooperative conversation, however, make it such that cardinal numerals typically express the exact number (e.g., five = no more and no less than five) unless otherwise modified (e.g., at least five or at most five).
[31][1]: 358 From a semantic point of view, a definite NP is one that is identifiable and activated in the minds of the first person and the addressee.
[32]: 84 This accounts for cases of form-meaning mismatch, where a definite determiner results in an indefinite NP, such as the example I met this guy from Heidelberg on the train, where the underlined NP is grammatically definite but semantically indefinite.
