Rant, essay, all the same. Some of the diagrammes will be messed up, nevermind those.
DETERMINING DETERMINERS
Determiners in the English Noun Phrase Structure
This is a determiner. As is that. School children in any English class, be they native speakers of the language or not, in English speaking and in non-English speaking countries, can tell you that. But that is not all there is to it. Somehow, determiners are distinguished from each other and from other types of words, like verbs and propositions, nouns and adjectives. The difference between a verb and a determiner is easy to spot, perhaps: for instance, a verb is a word expressing an action of some kind, such as walking, talking, sleeping, sweeping and also the ‘action’ of being. Determiners do not express any action, therefore they must be different from verbs. But then what are they, what do they do, and how do the different types of determiners work together in a noun phrase?
A determiner is a grammatical (i.e. not a lexical) word that if it is there at all must always co-occur with a nominal in a noun phrase. According to Noel Burton-Roberts in Analysing Sentences, determiners “give information relating to definiteness and indefiniteness (roughly, whether the thing referred to by the NP is familiar to both speaker and hearer or not) and information on quantity and proportion.” In other words, there are a number of classes of determiners and what they do is give some extra information about the noun phrase. “The basic determiners are the articles”, Burton-Roberts goes on to say. The articles, the and a or an, are the simplest kind of determiner: they give information on definiteness. If both speaker and audience know what they are talking about, the speaker will use the, the definite article, if not they will use a or an. Consider the following, for instance.
1. When I came home from work yesterday, there was a monkey in my bathtub.
The speaker is introducing a new fact and the audience is supposedly surprised by the discovery of a monkey in the bathtub, thus the speaker uses the indefinite article, a. However, once the story continues the audience knows what monkey is being referred to.
2. The monkey had filled up the bath and was drifting around happily, munching a banana.
It is clear which monkey this is, namely the one previously found in the bathtub, therefore the speaker will use the definite article, the. Not all determiners are articles, though. “The articles are ‘basic’ in the sense that they provide a touchstone as to what counts as a determiner: any expression that occupies the same position in NP structure as an article counts as a determiner.” So if you look at a sentence like this:
3a. I chased that monkey out of my house, of course,
then that must be a determiner, because that occupies the place that the would otherwise take:
3b. I chased the monkey out of my house, of course.
You can see that that takes the place of the as it is impossible to have both in the same NP:
3c. *I chased the that monkey out of my house, of course.
This is what distinguishes determiners from other pre-head modifiers. You can put in as many adjectives and modifying phrases as you like, but there is only one determiner in the determiner position.
3d. I chased that little cheeky hairy brown banana eating bathtub parasite out.
That is a demonstrative, one of the other subclasses of determiners. There are four demonstratives in English: this, to refer to something that is singular and near, these, plural and near, that, singular and distant, and those, plural and distant. These are not the same as articles because they do not give the same sort of information on the following noun phrase; articles make the noun phrase definite or indefinite, while demonstratives give information on number and, generally, distance of the referred object to the speaker. Demonstratives are always understood to be definite. In this sentence:
4. I cannot stand that monkey in the bathtub, but these squirrels chasing each other around my chandelier are rather cute,
it is clear from the use of that in that monkey in the bathtub that the speaker assumes the listener knows exactly which monkey is being referred to, because either it has been mentioned before or the speaker is pointing at the monkey, there present for the listener to see. Likewise, these in these squirrels chasing each other around my chandelier indicates definiteness: the squirrels are rather close to the speaker, and the speaker assumes the listener knows exactly which squirrels are being referred to.
Another determiner subtype is the genitive (the possessive) determiner: words like my, your, his, her, its, our, their and Marlowe’s, or rather, the ‘s in Marlowe’s. These, also, are determiners, because they occupy the same place as the article. The following sentence is ungrammatical because of this:
5a. *The Marlowe’s typewriter.
In sentences where this does make sense, such as in
5b. The monkey’s typewriter.
the article the does not belong to typewriter but to monkey’s. Therefore, both words, the and monkey’s, are in determiner position, but as one unit, not two fighting for the position. They can be split up into the actual determiner and a noun phrase within a noun phrase: “a possessive determiner can consist either of a possessive pronoun (my, your, etc.) or a full
NP + -s. This is called the possessive, or genitive, -s.” Thus, this is the structure of sentence 5b:
NP
Det Nom
Poss N
NP ‘s typewriter
Det Nom
Art N
The monkey
Genitives indicate whether the following noun phrase belongs to someone or something, as well as which thing or person it belongs to. This belonging can be ownership as well as being a property of, for instance. Take the following sentences:
6a. Marlowe’s hat.
6b. Marlowe’s colour.
6c. Marlowe’s picture.
In these sentences there is mention of a monkey named Marlowe. Marlowe’s hat is a hat that belongs to Marlowe. In Marlowe’s colour, however, the colour is a property of Marlowe, either in the sense that it is the colour of his fur, or in the sense it is the colour that looks good on him. Either way, the colour is not an object owned by Marlowe. Marlowe’s picture might be owned by Marlowe, but it is generally understood that this is a picture depicting Marlowe. Genitives, too, are always definite. A sentence like this randomly thrown into a conversation about nuclear physics, for instance:
7a. I don’t like his hippo much, it is always trying to step on my toes,
is not ungrammatical, but it will naturally warrant the question: whose hippo? However, a sentence like this:
7b. John is a nice man, but I don’t like his hippo much,
makes perfect sense, because the listener will know whose hippo the speaker is talking about, namely John’s hippo.
A third kind of determiner is the quantifying determiner. They are some, any, no, each, every, either and neither. Their function is clearly to provide information about the quantity of whatever is named in the noun phrase in a more specific way than the demonstratives do. For instance, in the following phrase:
8. When I came home today, there were no monkeys in my bathtub, but every banana had gone and so had some party hats.
it is clear exactly how many monkeys there were in the bathtub: none at all. Likewise, the listener has a clear idea of how many bananas were missing: namely a lot, while only some, that is to say not terribly many, of the party hats had gone. Other than the demonstrative, which gives information about whether the noun phrase is a singular or a plural, the quantifying determiner gives information about the relative amount within a plural, and it is able to express the zero quantity. It does not carry the same information about relative distance that the demonstrative does, and neither is it as definite as the demonstrative. In fact, the quantifying determiner can be either definite or indefinite, depending on the exact determiner used. If you look at sentence 8, the phrase every banana is definite. The listener knows exactly which bananas are being referred to, namely all of them. However, the phrase some party hats is indefinite, because there is supposedly a greater number of party hats, of which apparently only a few were missing. It is not clear which exact hats have gone missing though, therefore the hats referred to are indefinite. Whether the red hats, the blue hats, or the yellow ones with pink polka dots are gone is not defined by the speaker and the listener cannot be expected to know. The speaker does not even indicate exactly how many hats have gone: if he or she were to do that, he would no longer be using a quantifying determiner. While words like one, two, and one million six hundred thousand five hundred ninety two and a half are certainly words indicating a certain quantity, they are not determiners, because they do not take up the determiner position. They are quantifying adjectives following the determiner:
9. The fifty monkeys that escaped from the zoo the day before yesterday have been invading homes and stealing bananas.
This would be ungrammatical with words like some and any though, therefore those are definitely determiners:
10. *The some monkeys that escaped from the zoo have not yet been captured.
This resembles somewhat the following, perfectly grammatical sentence:
11. Some of the monkeys that escaped from the zoo have not yet been captured.
But this does not mean the same thing and the construction here is different. This sort of constructions will be discussed after the overview of the last kind of determiner, the interrogative determiner.