Determiners

Linguistics 222

In modern grammar the forms a, an are called articles and they are called indefinite determiners in contemporary syntax. It is thought by some usually linguistics with a semantics background that these forms are not determiners, but that they are allomorphs of the numeral one when the numeral is unstressed. Similarly we could exclude such forms as some, any, few, a few as determiners. Determiners would then be definite.

The definite determiners include the and the demonstrative determiners this and that. The function of the determiner is two-fold (at least). In the first function is marks an object as introduced in the discourse:

1.    Mary bought a box of candy. She ate the box of candy before dinner.

These two sentences form part of a discourse. In the first sentence is the first mention of a box of candy. In the second sentences, same box of candy is referred to. Once an object has been brought into a discourse, a non-definite form cannot be used to modify it. Note the following pair of sentences:

2.    Mary bought a box of candy. She had eaten a box of candy before dinner.

In the second sentence a box of candy. does not refer to the same box of candy in the first sentence. In English we are more likely to use an additional modifier in one of the sentences:

3.   Mary bought another box of candy. She had eaten a box of candy before dinner.

If a/an are some kind of a numeral the indefinite status of the object is determined by the lack of a definite determiner.

Another controversial point is what is the configurational relation of the determiner to the form is modifies? In this theory, the determiner is assigned to the specifier position:

 

In the second theory, which is somemore minimalist, there are no specifiers and there is no intermediate node. XP may directly dominate X. Here, the determiner is adjoined to NP since it modifiers the NP:

This is the structure we will adopt here. As mentioned earlier, there is a still more minimal theory. The head level is equivalent to the phrasal level if the head takes no complement:

There is another view of the categorial status of the determiner. In this view the determiner takes the following NP as its complement. This view is becoming more popular and makes more sense than the above three. It can be adapted to any of the three versions of X-bar theory. We will represent it only in the most minimal form:

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