Determiner

A determiner is a word, phrase or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common kinds of determiners include definite and indefinite articles (like the English the and a), demonstratives (like this and that), possessive determiners (like my and their), and quantifiers (like many, few and several).

Most determiners have been traditionally classed along with adjectives, and this still occurs: for example, demonstrative and possessive determiners are sometimes described as demonstrative adjectives and possessive adjectives respectively. However, modern theorists of grammar prefer to distinguish determiners as a separate word class from adjectives, which are simple modifiers of nouns, expressing attributes of the thing referred to. This distinction applies particularly in languages like English which use definite and indefinite articles, frequently as a necessary component of noun phrases – the determiners may then be taken to be a class of words which includes the articles as well as other words that function in the place of articles. (The composition of this class may depend on the particular language's rules of syntax; for example, in English the possessives my, your etc. are used without articles and so can be regarded as determiners, whereas their Italian equivalents mio etc. are used together with articles and so may be better classed as adjectives.) Not all languages can be said to have a lexically distinct class of determiners.

In some languages, the role of certain determiners can be played by affixes (prefixes or suffixes) attached to a noun, or by other types of inflection. For example, definite articles are represented by suffixes in the Scandinavian languages, Romanian, Bulgarian and Macedonian (the Swedish bok "book", when definite, becomes boken "the book", while the Romanian caiet "notebook" similarly becomes caietul "the notebook"). Some languages such as Finnish have possessive affixes, which play the role of possessive determiners like my and his.

X-bar theory contends that every noun has a corresponding determiner (or specifier). In a case where a noun does not have an explicit determiner (as in physics uses mathematics), X-bar theory hypothesizes the presence of a zero article, or zero determiner. Some modern grammatical approaches regard determiners (rather than nouns) as the head of their phrase, and thus refer to such phrases as determiner phrases rather than noun phrases. For more detail on theoretical approaches to the status of determiners, see Noun phrase: Noun phrases with and without determiners.