In the last chapter we looked at the definition and subcategories of nouns as well as the basic structure of noun phrases.  We noted that nouns may be accompanied by several types of modifiers in the noun phrase, and we looked at quantifiers and partitive structure more closely.  In this chapter we will continue looking at noun phrases, focusing on determiners, articles in particular, and on pronouns.

Activity 9.1: Identifying Determiners

There are several sentences below.  There is also a list of words.  Your task is to select one of the words from the list and substitute it for just one word in each sentence. 

Drag each word from the list over the word you want to take out. Try this for every word in the list by dragging the word back to the list and putting in another one.

Defining Determiners

What you should have discovered in the substitution game above is that the words on the list can only be substituted for one word in each sentence, and all those words were the same original word.  That is, all the words on the list, and one word from each sentence are all members of the same syntactic category, determiners.  Only words from the same syntactic category are mutually substitutable in this way.  However, you should also have discovered some limitations in the substitutability.  Some determiners are plural and must accompany plural nouns.  Also, two determiners can not be used at the same time to modify the same noun; for example, it is ungrammatical to say, The my dog ran by fast.

Determiners are a group of words that modify nouns.  More exactly, they work to specify or limit the noun.  Specifiers in English phrases always precede the head of the phrase, and in noun phrases, the determiners do, in fact, precede the head noun.  In English, the determiners can be further divided into three groups: 1) articles, 2) demonstratives, 3) possessives.  Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman include quantifiers as determiners and provide linguistic arguments for doing so.  This point is an issue of theoretical grammar, and I do not find subsuming quantifiers under determiners to be helpful for pedagogical purposes, which is our concern here.

The article determiners include the words a, an, and the.  The demonstrative determiners include the words this, that, these, and those.  The possessive determiners include possessive nouns (like Bob’s), possessive noun phrases (like the beautiful woman’s), and the possessive pronouns: my, your, his, her, its, our, their.

The possessive pronouns aren’t particularly difficult for nonnative speakers.  Most languages have some way to designate possession, so the concept of possession is easily grasped.  Some learners mix up his and her for a while, but the difficulty seems to lie in the closeness of meaning between the two words and deciding which form connects to he and which form connects to she, since there is no overt relationship to assist.  We will look more closely at possessives later when we look at pronouns.  Likewise, the demonstratives are a fairly easy concept to grasp, and difficulties seem to lie in the proper spelling of this and these and matching for plurality.  We will have occasion to look at the demonstratives again, too, as we look at pronouns.  The articles, however, are very difficult, especially for speakers of languages that do not have articles, and we will now take a closer look at them.

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