Determiners and quantifiers
As we saw in Chapter 14, determiners are words like a, the and my which form noun phrases with nouns. Some nouns require determiners in order to form noun phrases. This is the case for singular count nouns, as illustrated by example (29).
On the other hand, plural count nouns (30) and mass nouns (31) can form noun phrases by themselves, which means that they occur optionally with determiners.
There are a number of categories of determiners which we briefly describe here.
Articles
The words a and the are described as articles, which can be definite (the) or indefinite (a, some). Definite articles are used when the noun phrase refers to something familiar to the speaker and hearer, perhaps because it has already been a topic of conversation or because it is salient in terms of shared know ledge. Indefinite articles are used when the speaker wants to introduce something new or unfamiliar into the conversation. While the English definite article does not inflect for number (for example, the book, the books), the indefinite article has two distinct forms (for example, a book, some books). When the word some is an indefinite article, it is unstressed. Its stressed counterpart is a quantifier (see below). As example (32) illustrates, a noun phrase headed by a plural count noun does not have to rely on the presence of a determiner to give rise to an indefinite noun phrase.
Furthermore, noun phrases can be generic with either definite articles (33a), with indefinite articles (33b) or with no article at all (33c). Observe that this is the one situation in which (some) singular count nouns are licensed to occur without a determiner (33d). A generic noun phrase is interpreted as refer ring to a whole class of entities in general rather than a specific instance of that category.
Demonstrative determiners
Demonstrative determiners are deictic expressions like this and that, both of which inflect for number:
Possessive determiners
These are expressions like my and your. In English, these inflect for number and person features of the possessor rather than the possessed.
Interrogative determiners
These are expressions like which, whose and what. These are used for asking questions, as illustrated by the examples in (36).
Observe that the determiner whose in (36b) is possessive as well as interrogative.
Quantifiers
Finally, nouns can also be preceded by quantifiers. These are expressions like any, no, (stressed) some, enough, every and each, which quantify the noun in terms of number or amount. Some linguists treat quantifiers as a subtype of determiner because many quantifiers cannot co-occur with other determiners. The formal approach to identifying a determiner is to see whether it can co-occur with the articles, which are viewed as the prototypical determiners. The English noun phrase only permits a single determiner, so any element that meets the distributional criterion of forming a noun phrase together with a sin gular count noun and cannot co-occur with an article is classified as a deter miner. This approach is illustrated by the following examples:
Clearly, some quantifiers meet these criteria, as illustrated by the examples in (38).
However, other quantifiers can co-occur with (precede) determiners, as shown by the examples in (39).
For some linguists, who favour a strictly distributional approach to word classes, these are described as pre-determiners. However, many linguists prefer to treat quantifiers as a separate class of their own on the basis of their semantic properties.
