An Introduction To Determiners In English

Today we will look at determiners, which are not that exciting, but they are the type of words we need to know. They do make a big difference to your English sentences and if you don’t have determiners you really just have a bunch of random words, so they are pretty important. 

So let’s look at what they are and how they work.

What Are Determiners?

Determiners are the little words that come before a noun, usually to help you understand the quantity or ownership of the nouns.

These will be words like:  The, a, an, this, my

Different Types Of Determiners

They can actually be broken down into different categories, which will look at now.

Knowing the name for each type isn’t too important, but knowing how to actually use the determiners correctly is important, and these categories will help make sure you are using them the right way.    

Articles

An article determiner helps you talk about something either in a vague, or more direct way. It allows you to be specific or non-specific about a noun.

The two main articles are The and A/An

(yes, I know that’s 3, but a and an are basically the same. It just depends on the next word. If it starts with a vowel, use AN, if it starts with an consonant, use A)

If I say “a car” …you don’t really know which car, there are millions of cars in the world, so which one do I mean?  Its non specific and using A/An like this is called the indefinite article.

If I say “the car” I am narrowing things down a bit, I am clearly talking about one specific car and of course the context of the conversation will help with this too. Using The like this is called the definite article. 

You are going to see these two being used a lot, so look out for them.

Demonstrative

Demonstrative determiners allow you explain the noun in time or space and these are: these, this, that, those.

Context will again be important here, but really these determiners allow you to specifically point out what you are talking about. Sometimes it can good to imagine (or actually physically) pointing to the noun while using this determiner. 

“this car”  or “that house”

These are actually the same words used for the “demonstrative pronouns” so it can seem a little confusing, but really you can use them the same way, when they are pronouns they are just being used to talk about people, which are still nouns, so really it’s the same thing.

Distributive

Distributive determiners allow you to talk about a group of nouns, or a smaller part of them.

These will be words like: All, every, both, each. 

Interrogative

Interrogative determiners are for when you want to find out more information about a noun.

These are:  What, which, whose.

These are pretty much always going to be used in a question type situation.

If we go back to the example above with the non specific, indefinite noun “a car” …we can use interrogative determiners to get more information about this and ask “what car?”

Possessive

Possessive determiners are also a form of personal pronoun and allow you to say who the owner of the noun is, or how it is related to another noun in the sentence.

These will be words like: my, your, his, their.

“my car”

Quantifying Determiners and Numbers

Quantifying determiners tell us about “how many”, or “how much”. These are going to be quite vague, such as:  many, several, all, some.

“I have some apples”

However, you can make things a little more accurate by using numbers, which are also a form of quantifying determiners

“I have three apples” 

Relative Determiners

Relative determiners can start to feel a little complicated, as they tell us something about the main noun, (or a noun phrase), but it is connected to a dependant clause.

These are going to be words like: which, whatever, what

“I don’t know which car you bought”

They also work in a very similar way to relative pronouns.

The Placement Of Determiners In A Sentence

The placement and use of determiners is really easy … they always go before anything else. You always start with the determiner and go from there.

A dress

A red dress   …”red a dress” would be wrong. You have to see the red, as being part of the dress here, and class it as a “noun phrase” so the determiner (A) would go before everything.

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see that while determiners may just look like the little filler words in a sentence, how they are used can drastically change the meaning of a sentence and they really help to tie everything together.

You are going to see these a lot in English and it can be a good idea to just study the sentences you see and look at how the determiners can help shape the meaning of things and how they link to other words in the sentence.

You will of course get them muddled up for a while and that is perfectly normally, just keep practicing and you will start to get to grips with them.    

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