Talk:English determiners

Untitled
Singular forms of nouns are often used with zero determiners in such phrases as Hand to mouth and man versus machine. Any thoughts?Tumpalion (talk) 17:01, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

This is gibberish: "....words or phrases that precede a noun or noun phrase and serve to express its reference in the context." Can anyone re-write this in understandable English?

Dominic Cronin (talk) 15:07, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Complete rewrite
I did a complete rewrite that clarifies the distinction between the category of words and their typical function in noun phrases. I also added citations throughout and removed the Refimprove tag.--Brett (talk) 02:40, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

Determinative vs. specifier
A recent edit replaced the functional label "determinative" with "specifier". Based on the GA discussion, I assume that that this was done to avoid the determiner/determinative terminology issue. I see three reasons to prefer addressing the determiner/determinative distinction in the article rather than side-stepping it with the term "specifier".

(1) The term "specifier" is fairly theory-specific. As far as I'm aware, it is only used in theories that incorporate X-bar notation. Somebody trained in, say, Systemic Functional Grammar (or some other theory of syntax) would likely recognize the functional label determiner or determinative but probably would not be familiar with the notion of specifier as it is used here. In short, determiner/determinative seems to be the more widely used term. (2) As I understand it, theories that do use the term "specifier" in this way tend to also follow Abney's analysis of nominals as D taking an NP complement rather than DP as a specifier of N. Thus, it seems a bit strange for the article to use the term "specifier" as a functional label when theories that use that label tend to treat these specifiers as heads rather than specifiers. In short, the people who actually use "specifier" as a functional label would probably not apply it to many of the things called specifiers in this article. (3) Some of the most cited sources in the article do not actually use "specifier" or any substantially similar term, so a find-and-replace swap of the terms risks misattribution. Of course, we cannot avoid this entirely if our goal is consistent use throughout the article, but we can minimize it: using the label "determinative" when the cited source uses "determiner" (or vice-versa) does not imply that the source assumes a particular theory of syntax, but using the label "specifier" does.

Given the ongoing GA review, I thought it made sense to raise the point here rather than simply editing the article. Whmovement (talk) 19:50, 11 July 2021 (UTC)


 * You make a number of good points. In response, I would put forward the following: (1) I think clarity and ease of reading for a general reader should trump the theory-specific sensibilities of the linguist reader, and I think the consistent use of a single term for the function is the best way to achieve that. If we need to choose a single functional term, then determiner + specifier seems much easier to follow than determiner + determinative. (2) The determinative / determiner issue is addressed directly, and the choice of specifier is explicityly explained. (3) Specifier is used in this way by Culicover and Jackendoff in Simpler Syntax (e.g., "Consider the structure of the comparative phrase. More and less, as usual, are quantifiers; they can occur in the specifier of NP (44a)").


 * That being said, and GA review notwithstanding, be bold. If you can find a good solution to this dilema, that would be great.Brett (talk) 21:12, 11 July 2021 (UTC)