[Written for inclusion in: The Oxford Handbook of Determiners, edited by Solveiga Armoskaite & Martina Wiltschko, OUP 2018?]

Arguments against the universality of D and determiners Richard Hudson

Almost every modern grammar of English recognises a class of words called ‘determiner’ or ‘determinative’, including words such as an, the, some, this, which and every, and it is widely agreed that this set of words constitutes a distinct word class. The following definition is typical:

Determiners form a closed class of functional words which have the general property of not themselves permitting modification. The class of determiners includes articles, personal determiners, demonstratives, interrogative determiners, exclamatory determiners, and quality determiners. (Payne 2006)

This analysis is thoroughly modern and is one of the features that consistently distinguishes modern grammars from earlier ones. A similarly typical example of the latter is a recommendation from the 1911 report of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology:

That English 'this'and 'that’, if used with a Noun, be called Demonstrative Adjectives, but if used without a Noun be called Demonstrative Pronouns; and that the same terminology be applied to the corresponding words in the other languages. (Joint committee on Grammatical Terminology 1911:19)

In 1911, if this wasn’t a pronoun, it must be an adjective, whereas modern grammarians would classify it in the second case as a determiner.

Distinguishing English determiners from adjectives is one of the achievements of modern grammarians, and I certainly don’t want to question this. From the very first grammatical use of deteminer (by Bloomfield), it was clear why they had to be distinguised from adjectives:

Our limiting adjectives fall into two sub-classes of determiners and numeratives... The determiners are defined by the fact that certain types of noun expressions (such as house or big house) are always accompanied by a determiner (as, this house, a big house). (Bloomfield 1933:203)

But notice that although Bloomfield recognised that determiners are syntactically special, he still classified them as a sub-class of adjectives.

However, four years before Bloomfield’s book, Harold Palmer had suggested a different analsis, albeit tied to the synonym determinative.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to draw any rigid line of demarcation between pronouns and determinatives, for most English determinatives are used both as modifiers of nouns and as pronouns. Some grammarians consider such determinatives as pronouns which can be used adjectivally (i.e. as modifiers of nouns), while others consider them as adjectives (i.e. modifiers of nouns) which can be used pronominally (i.e. to replace nouns). The simplest and

most rational plan would seem to be to consider the personal pronouns alone as pronouns proper, and to place all others in the general category of determinatives, specifying in each case whether they may be used as modifiers, as pronouns, or as both. (Palmer 1924:42)

Determinatives. Under this heading are included a number of words which cannot be placed among the qualificative adjectives, because

(a) they cannot be used both epithetically and predicatively;

(b) they are rarely or never susceptible of comparison;

(c) the are rarely or never susceptible of modification by other words. (ibid:45)

Notice that here too we have a recognition of ‘determinatives’ as grammatically special, though the distinctive characteristics complement the one noted by Bloomfield; but Palmer, unlike Bloomfield, considers and rejects the idea that determinatives are adjectives. Instead, he stresses their similarity to pronouns.

Modern grammarians of English agree on the distinctive characteristics of our determiners (or determinatives):

Any singular countable noun needs a determiner (in a book but not: *in book). A determiner can’t be used predicatively (this big book or this book which is big but not: *big

book which is this). A determiner can’t be inflected for comparison or modified (some bigger books or some very

big books but not: *somer books or *very some books).

We also agree that these characteristics show that determiners are not adjectives – and (pace Bloomfield) not even a special subtype of adjective – and that there is a signficant overlap between determiners and pronouns. Where we disagree is over how to explain this overlap and how to generalise from English to other languages.

English determiners are pronouns Standard treatments of determiners ignore their overlap with pronouns or at best dismiss it as an uninteresting fact without consequences:

Given that many items can belong to more than one category … it is not surprising that some words can be used both as determiners and as pronouns. (Radford 1997:49)

However, the overlap between these two categories is surely significant, since almost all the clear determiners of English can also be used as pronouns (i.e. without a following common noun), with just four exceptions: the, an, every and relative whose (Hudson 1990:269). Admittedly the exceptions include the two most common determiners, but they are outnumbered 5:1 by the regular cases. The converse is not true: there are far more pronouns that cannot be used as determiners, so (pace (Postal 1966)) there is no case for treating pronouns as a sub-class of determiners.

This analysis faces two objections, one concerning form and the other meaning. Regarding form, there are six pronouns whose form varies with the presence or absence of a common noun: my~mine, your~yours, her~hers, our~hers, their~theirs, no~none. This variation can easily be handled in the morphosyntax as syntactically conditioned allomorphy. For example, the pronoun MY has a

complement which may be overt or covert, and is realised as my in one case and mine in the other. Notice too that this variation isn’t restricted to possessive pronouns, since NO shows exactly the same pattern. In short, there is a minor generalisation about determiners that they may have two forms conditional on the presence or absence of an overt common noun.

The other potential objection to the analysis is that some pronouns have different meanings again depending on whether or not they combine with a common noun. The variation concerns the animacy-sex distinction male, female and neuter (as in he, she, it), which is relevant only in the absence of a complement (and only in the singular). For instance, what is compatible with any kind of common noun – what linguist, what child, what person as well as what book, what idea; but without a common noun it can only be used for inanimates (or at least non-humans). The same is true of the demonstratives this and that; so I know that girl is fine, but can’t be reduced to I know that. And of course, the personal pronouns distinguish he, she, it but the equivalent with a common noun is the, which neutralises this distinction. Once again, the semantic variation is easy to describe as a minor generalisation about the effect of syntax on meaning.

In earlier work I have argued for an analysis in which there is no categorial difference between pronouns with an without a common noun . My argument was that it takes more than one distinctive property to justify a distinct category, so (for example) although words are distinguished by their first sound, there is nothing to say about words that start with (say) /b/ other than that they start with /b/. Similarly, if the only difference between this in (1) and (2) is that one is combined with a common noun but the other doesn’t, then there is no case for a categorial distinction between them. However I now think this conclusion is premature because of these two minor generalisations about the interaction between syntax and form or meaning. I now believe, therefore, that the category ‘determiner’ is needed in order to allow these generalisations to be stated.

But the facts just reviewed do not support the standard analysis in which ‘determiner’ is a top-level word class, alongside ‘noun’, ‘verb’ and so on. On the contrary, they show clearly that determiners are also pronouns, distinguished from other pronouns mainly by their ability to combine with a following common noun. Moreover, the distributional similarities between pronouns and common and proper nouns suggest strongly that they all belong to a single super-class of ‘noun’ (Hudson 1984:90; Huddleston & Pullum 2002:327), so determiners are not only pronouns but also nouns.

This question of classification really matters for syntax. Suppose that determiners are indeed pronouns and nouns. In that case, this would be a noun in both these examples:

(1) I like this.(2) I like this book.

And similarly for almost all the other determiners. But if this in this book is a noun, the obvious question is which of them is the head of the phrase. According to the DP hypothesis, the pronoun is the head of the phrase and the common noun is its complement (Hudson 1984:90–92; Abney 1987). But unlike the DP hypothesis, the analysis I am suggesting gives the phrase a noun as its head, so the phrase is a noun phrase – just as had always been suggested until the DP was born.

Applying this analysis to our examples, this is simply a pronoun in (1) but a determiner in (2); but it is the same lexical item (THAT) in both. These two possibilities are typical of determiners, but there are some that are only determiners (e.g. THE), and of course there are also some pronouns which are not determiners (e.g. ME). The analysis is displayed in Figure 1.

noun

pronoun proper noun

determiner ME

THE THAT

common noun

Figure 1: Determiners as pronouns

One of the many attractions of this analysis is to obviate the need for abstract invisible determiners in order to show the distributional similarities between noun phrases with and without determiners. For instance, if the object of a verb must be a DP, an abstract D is needed where there is no overt one, as in I like black coffee. But if it must be a noun phrase, and a determiner is a pronoun and a noun, then either the pronoun or the common noun will qualify as the head of this phrase.

Another attraction is to remove the need for ‘determiner’ as a grammatical function within a noun phrase, or ‘fused heads’ when there is no common noun, as advocated in some grammars (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:24–56). If the head of the phrase is the determiner, and this is classified as both pronoun and noun, then the phrase automatically qualifies as a noun phrase and the only functions needed are ‘head’ and ‘complement’.

What are the English determiners?The distinguishing characteristics of our determiners are all syntactic, not semantic. Just to summarise, a determiner has the following properties:

A. It allows a singular noun to be countable. B. It is a pronoun, so it inherits the common properties of pronouns such as not allowing

modification by adjectives (though almost and hardly are sometimes allowed: almost every book, but not: *almost each book; hardly any book).

C. It excludes any other determiner.

This list includes the properties mentioned by Bloomfield and Palmer, with the addition of fact C, which they don’t mention. This property explains why we can’t combine (say) the, that or some with my, even though the meanings are compatible (and are expressible through other constructions, as in that book of mine or some friends of mine). It follows automatically if determiners are pronouns which allow a common noun (not a pronoun) as complement.

Given these identifying criteria, which words qualify as determiners? The following is, so far as I know, a complete list (except for two additions to be made shortly). (The asterisk is explained below.)

definite:o the

o this/these, that/thoseo *my, *your, *his, *her, *its, *our, *theiro ‘s (see below)o *whose (relative)

indefinite:o a/an, *one, someo each, everyo which, what, whichever, whatevero any, eithero no, neithero *whose (interrogative)

The words listed all have the properties A-C, and typically they can occur either with or without a common noun as complement, though as mentioned earlier there are four exceptions where the common noun is obligatory.

The words marked with an asterisk may in fact be a single morphological realisation for two distinct syntactic words (written below in capitals). For example, one could be analysed syntactically as A ONE, to explain why this sequence isn’t available to match the one (as in the one thing I regret). In this analysis, the list of determiners would include A but not ONE, so there would be no precedent for including numerals (which otherwise combine freely with determiners: my two books, any three books, etc.).

Another case where morphology may be out of step with syntax is in all the possessive determiners. I have included ’S among the determiners because there are good grounds for recognising a clitic at the end of possessive phrases such as the King of England’s (Hudson 1990:276–82; Hudson 2004; Hudson 2013). One attraction of this analysis is that it explains why such a phrase acts like a determiner in relation to common-nouns: it acts like a determiner because its head is the determiner ’S. Now, if this analysis is right, then it allows an analysis of all the possessives in which they also contain ’S: most convincingly, perhaps, whose is a single morphological realisation for WHO + ’S and its = IT + ’S, but once these are recognised as two-word combinations, the same analysis extends easily to my = ME + ’S, your = YOU + ’S, and so on. This move greatly reduces the number of English determiners because there is just one possessive determiner, ’S, which combines with a number of ordinary pronouns just as it combines freely with full noun phrases; so all the starred words no longer qualify as determiners, leaving just 16 determiners.

The argument so far, then, leads to the conclusion that English has a relatively small number of determiners, forming a number of semantically-based groups:

article: the, a/an, some demonstrative: this/these, that/those possessive: ’S interrogative: which, what, whichever, whatever distributive: each, every negative-polarity: any, either negative: no, neither.

All these words allow a singular common noun to be countable, but of course some of them also combine with plural common nouns, as in these books or what books. But there are also pronouns that allow plural common nouns: we/us and you, as in we linguists and you students or

you guys (which is rapidly turning into the default plural second-person pronoun). This addition gives us 18 determiners, with various restrictions for number and countability.

Many grammars give a much longer list, so it is worth reviewing the words which do not qualify as determiners. This list is based on the one in a standard grammar (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:356), and includes my suggested alternative analyses:

numerals: two, three etc. – common nouns which take other common nouns as complement (Hudson 1990:302–8).

universal quantifiers: all, both – pronouns which take almost any kind of noun as complement (all you boys, both the boys); if the complement is a personal pronoun, the usual order is reversed to give they all instead of the expected *all they.

another – AN + OTHER, but with two meanings, one of which matches that of SOME MORE (another beer = some more beer; another book = a different book).

a few, a little - A + common noun FEW/LITTLE, but with special syntax and semantics (possibly classifying FEW/LITTLE as adjective as well as noun in order to explain a very few/little alongside a good few and quite a few (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:392))

several, certain, various – restricted common nouns or adjectives (ibid) much, many, few, little – both adjectives and nouns, to explain I didn’t see very much of it. enough – a pronoun (to explain why it’s incompatible with a determiner: *my enough

money) sufficient – both an adjective and a noun, to explain I’ve got almost sufficient

Clearly the alternative analyses need to be fleshed out and justified, and a particular challenge is the rather odd pattern of words which allow almost and nearly: almost every/all/any, but *almost each; nearly all but *nearly every/any/each – not to mention the equally odd difference between almost and nearly, whereby very is allowed by one but not by the other (very nearly but *very almost).

Leaving analytical details aside, the conclusion is clear: there is no evidence that any of these forms, with the possible exception of enough, is a determiner – a pronoun that takes just a common noun as its complement. It’s true that the rejected words all tend to occur at the start of a noun phrase, before the ordinary adjectives, but so do prepositions, and nobody would suggest that prepositions are determiners. This conclusion sits uncomfortably with the widespread assumption that logical quantifiers are always determiners (Keenan 2006); for instance, the universal quantifier is often identified with either all or every, but we have seen that one of these is a determiner while the other is not.

This detailed discussion of English was necessary because English is the most analysed language, and the language on which supposedly universal categories are often based. The category ‘determiner’ is probably the most prominent of such categories because it was specially invented for English, so it is important to recognise, first, that even in English, ‘determiner’ is not, in fact, a distinct ‘top-level’ word class, as usually assumed. The second point to note is that this rather ill-defined category has acted as the dumping ground for a disparate range of words that don’t fit comfortably into other categories. We now turn to the semantics of the English determiners, as defined here.

English determiners are semantically similar Why have these particular words developed a shared grammatical profile? This calls for a functional approach in which each language’s grammar is seen as one ‘engineering solution’ to a particular set of functional challenges (Evans & Levinson 2009). The functional challenge here is how to identify a

referent. Common nouns do this by invoking a general category such as ‘book’, which may be made more specific by means of modifiers such as ‘big book about linguistics’. Pronouns, on the other hand, identify referents more directly, typically by invoking features of the ongoing situation; so she identifies a female who is currently prominent, and this identifies something nearby and prominent. The contribution that determiners make is to combine these two methods by allowing a pronoun meaning to combine with the meaning defined by a common noun.

Seen from this point of view, the meanings of our determiners do share a rather abstract similarity, namely a concern with the referent and its identity. The meanings fall into two broad groups. The first (and larger) group is concerned with the identification of the referent:

(3) Whether or not it can be identified (definite and indefinite articles) (4) Identification by deictic location (demonstrative)(5) Identification by its relation to a ‘possessor’ (possessive)(6) Identification by the addressee (interrogative)(7) Identification as the speaker or the addressee (personal – we/us, you). I shall argue that this

group can be expanded to include markers of social status.

The second group deals with quantification – the size of a set defined by the noun and how this set relates to a higher structure. For instance, if the noun is used as the object in He ate __, how many acts of eating are there?

(8) Distributive: The noun set ‘distributes’ its members one at a time to the higher structure, e.g. He ate every cake means that there was one act of eating for each member.

(9) Negative-polarity: The noun set has an open number of members; e.g. Did he eat any cakes? leaves the number of cakes and eatings open, and He didn’t eat any cakes allows the number of cakes to be determined by the number of eatings.

(10) Negative: The noun set has no members; e.g. He ate no cakes.

However, these meanings are not unique to determiners. To take the most obvious example, identification by ‘possessor’ can be achieved by means of the preposition of, so the King of England’s daughter has the same meaning as the daughter of the King of England. Similarly, interrogatives are typically ordinary, uncomplemented, pronouns rather than determiners and of course most personal pronouns aren’t determiners. The last section will explore further the various ways in which meanings can be mapped onto grammar.

In the following discussion, ‘determiner’ is short for an English-type determiner – a pronoun with a common noun as complement – and ‘determiner meaning’ is the kind of meaning expressed by English determiners.

Languages treat determiners differently English isn’t the only language to choose the ‘determiner’ solution to the problem of expressing ‘determiner meaning’. This solution is so obvious that we may expect it to be widespread, but the details of the solution can vary from language to language.

In languages that have inflected gender, the similarities between determiners and pronouns may be even more obvious than in English. For example, in French the definite article has exactly the same range of inflected forms as the clitic object pronoun: l’ (singular before a vowel), le (masculine singular), la (feminine singular), les (plural).

(11)Quand je lis le livre, je le comprends. ‘When I read the book, I understand it.’

Spoken German shows a similar close relation between the definite article and a demonstrative pronoun which can be used either for ‘that one’ or ‘this one’, though there are a couple of small morphological differences in their respective paradigms (Durrell 1996:77).

(12)Der ist der Mann meiner Schwester. ‘That one is the husband of my sister.’

Similarly, possessives have exactly the same form in Italian whether they are determiners or un-complemented pronouns:

(13)Il mio amico sa che questo denaro è mio. ‘My friend knows that this money is mine.’

On the other hand, French and German also show differences of form between determiners and pronouns where the corresponding English forms are the same. For example, the demonstrative determiner in French is cet/ce/cette/ces (varying with phonology, gender and number), with the option of adding a suffix -ci (this) or -là (that) after the common noun; but the corresponding pronoun is celui/celle/ceux followed by -ci/là. Similarly, in German the distal demonstrative (‘that’) is an inflected form of jener, but the corresponding pronoun is based on jeniger and also includes an inflected form of the definite article: derjenige, denjenigen, and so on.

(14) Cet homme-ci est mon père, et celui- l à est son frère. ‘This man is my father, and that one is his brother.’

(15) Jener Mann ist mein Vater, und derjenige ist sein Bruder. ‘That man is my father, and that one is his brother.’

Another area of cross-language variation is the number of determiners that are allowed to co-occur. As we have seen, English has a one-determiner restriction, which is guaranteed if the complement of a determiner is a common noun; for example, the sequence *the my is ruled out because the complement of the must be a common noun, but my is a pronoun. This restriction is reminiscent of the one-modal restriction which forbids sequences like *will can (as in You will can swim if you try) in English Standard English though not in Scottish Standard English – once again a more or less arbitrary extra limitation which may itself have a functional motivation. Moreover it is possible that a functional explanation exists for the co-existence of the two one-item restrictions in one grammar.

Not all languages that have determiners also have the one-determiner restriction. For instance, Italian has either no such restriction, or at least a weaker version of it, so a possessive is normally preceded by an article, definite or indefinite: il mio amico or un mio amico, meaning respectively ‘my friend’ and ‘a friend of mine’. French is different again, since possessives disallow a preceding article when complemented but require one when un-complemented: (*le) mon ami, ‘my friend’ but *(le) mien, ‘mine’. Going further afield, the Cushitic language Beja/Tu Bedawye allows double demonstratives as well as article-demonstrative combinations (Hudson 1964:222). In this example, MSN = masculine singular nominative.

(16) u:-n u:-tak u:-n dib-ya

MSN-this MSN-man MSN-this fall-past.3sg

This man fell.

The scope for cross-language variation in the treatment of determiners seems to be bounded only by the limits of what might be functionally motivated. To take another well-known example, German determiners fall into two classes according to whether they require ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ inflection of a following adjective. ‘Strong’ inflection makes more distinctions, and is used

after determiners that make fewer distinctions, and vice versa for weak inflection (Durrell 1996:119). For instance, a ‘default’ adjective, used without any determiner at all, has strong inflection so it ends in -en in masculine genitive and -em in masculine dative: der Geschmack roten Weins ‘the taste of red wine’ but mit rotem Wein ‘with red wine’. In contrast, after a definite article, which distinguishes genitive and dative, the adjective has weak inflection, so it ends in –en in both cases: der Geschmack des roten Weins ‘the taste of the red wine’ and mit dem roten Wein ‘with the red wine’. It is easy to see the functional motivation for reducing redundant inflectional distinctions.

In short, even if a language has English-style determiners – pronouns complemented by common nouns – its grammar may differ significantly from that of English in terms of both morphology and syntax.

Languages express determiner meanings in different waysAn even more important source of diversity is in the ways in which languages solve the problem of expressing ‘determiner meanings’ (the meanings of English determiners). As we have seen, using pronouns as determiners is a popular solution to the problem, but it is by no means the only one, so this section will go through the meanings listed in (3)-(10), reviewing alternative ways of expressing them. This review is certainly not exhaustive, and is intended only to make a very general point: that meaning may be mapped onto syntax and morphology in many different ways, so similarity of meaning need not imply similarity of grammar.

a. Definiteness: How can a speaker indicate that the referent is already uniquely identifiable by the addressee? For example, a character in a story is typically introduced by an indefinite noun (i.e. in English a noun accompanied by an indefinite determiner), but then referred to by definite determiners or pronouns: Once upon a time there was a young man who lived next door to an old woman. The young man used to visit the old woman …. How do other languages make this distinction? In the following discussion I mention individual languages, without trying to generalise to other languages; but most of the patterns illustrated here are certainly found in large numbers of other languages.

Latin simply ignored definiteness, so (for examples) juvenis could be translated either as ‘a young man’ or ‘the young man’.

Classical Arabic marks indefinites with a suffix -n and definites with a prefix al-, and requires a modifying adjective to agree for definiteness as well as gender, number and case (ns = nominative singular):

(17) al-kita:b-u al-kabi:r-u

the-book-ns the-big-ns

the big book

(18) kita:b-u-n kabi:r-u-n

book-ns-indef big-ns-indef

a big book

Swedish marks definite nouns with a suffix and indefinites with an article – the reverse of the arrangement in Classical Arabic; so while ett hus means ‘a house’, hus-et means ‘the house’; moreover, when the noun has a preceding modifier, the definiteness is also marked by a preceding article, as in det stor-t hus-et, ‘the big house’ (Dahl 2004).

Turkish is unusual in two respects. First, definite is the unmarked default, so öküz means ‘the ox’ while bir öküz means ‘an ox’; and second, definiteness interacts with case marking of subjects and objects: subjects and definites are both unmarked, but definite objects require an accusative marker which is merely optional for indefinite objects, as in the following examples (Comrie 1981:132–135). The interaction with case may be functionally motivated by the fact that, at least in English texts, objects are, in fact, more likely to be indefinite than subjects are so indefiniteness is more predictable in objects (Biber et al. 1999:269).

(19) Hasan öküz-ü aldı.

Hasan ox-acc bought ‘Hasan bought the ox.’

(20) Hasan bir öküz(-ü) aldı.

Hasan one ox bought ‘Hasan bought an ox.’

In conclusion, languages have developed many different solutions to the problem of showing whether a noun is definite or indefinite, and the English-style determiner is just one solution among many.

b. Deictic location (demonstratives): How can as speaker show whether a definite referent is ‘here’ or ‘there’? In this case ‘here’ is normally where the speaker is, so something nearer to the addressee may be distinguished (as ‘that near you’) from something away from both participants (‘yonder’). Apparently every language has at least one demonstrative pronoun (Diessel 2006), so combining a demonstrative pronoun with the noun is an obvious solution. The relation between the pronoun and common noun is apposition, since they both define the same referent, and used to be more transparent in English, when we could say this my signature.

Alongside the pronoun solution we find a number of other possibilities. One possibility is the double demonstrative pattern found in Beja and illustrated in (16). Another is for the demonstrative to be attached as a clitic to the noun; this can be illustrated from Golin, a language of Papua New Guinea (Evans et al. 2005:52), where the clitic i can be glossed either as ‘topic’ or as ‘demonstrative’ and PROX means ‘near in time, but not in space’:

(21) na bol i bolain amin di-Ø-g-e

I table TOPIC on sit do-I-ASSERTION-PROX

‘I am sitting on this table.’

A cliticised demonstrative may even be seen in the French example (14) containing the suffixes -ci and -là. It is easy to imagine a genuine demonstrative adjective (as opposed to the misanalysed demonstrative determiners of traditional grammar) – a word with the grammar of an ordinary adjective rather than a pronoun. And then, of course, there is the ultimate alternative to grammar: gesture, which occurs more often with demonstratives than with any other word class (Diessel 2006).

c. Possession: who ‘possesses’ the referent? In this context, of course, ‘possess’ is used very loosely. It normally includes ordinary possession, as in John’s bike, but it also includes many other relations to some other entity, as in John’s defeat, John’s victory, John’s name, John’s height, John’s boss and so on. Possession is one of the relations expressed by English determiners, but, as mentioned earlier, even English provides an alternative way of expressing most of these relations (with the preposition of). Other languages offer a number of other solutions.

Welsh has possessive pronouns which stand in place of the definite article, as in English, but for non-prominal possessors it simply treats the possessor as a dependent of the possessed, marked as such only by the head-first word order which is normal in Welsh (Borsley, Tallerman & Willis 2007:26):

(22) Cŵn y cymdogion

dogs the neighbours

the neighbours’ dogs

Farsi has a similar arrangement, with possessor nouns simply juxtaposed to the possessed, but the existence of the possessor is marked on the possessed noun – an example of head-marking (Nichols 1986): e.g. barādar-e Maryam ‘Miriam’s brother’. When the possessor is pronominal, however, it is a clitic, e.g. barādar-am ‘my brother’.

More familiar is the converse of this structure with the more normal dependent marking of a genitive or a preposition such as of. In modern German the genitive normally follows the common noun, which has the normally expected determiner: das Haus meines Bruders, ‘the house of my brother’, but exceptionally, a genitive proper noun may precede the common noun and replace the determiner: Frau Benders Haus, ‘Mrs Bender’s house’ (Durrell 1996:35).

Beja is interesting, again, because it converts the possessor into an ordinary adjective with typical adjective grammar such as word order and inflectional morphology (inflecting for case, number and gender) (Hudson 1974). For example, an ordinary adjective (or noun) that ends in a vowel has a suffix -b when it is accusative, masculine and indefinite, but only when it follows the modified noun, and the same is true for possessives, which are marked as possessives by a vowel suffix, -i.

(23) akra ka:m rihan

strong camel I.saw

I saw a strong camel.

(24) ka:m akra-:b rihan(25) ka:m-i ni:wa rihan

camel-’s tail I.saw

I saw a camel’s tail.

(26) Ni:wa-:b ka:m-i-:b rih-an.

d. Interrogative. Which particular entity qualifies as the referent? If a language has interrogative pronouns (as presumably most or all languages do), the pronoun option is the obvious solution to the problem of combining interrogative meaning with the meaning of an ordinary common noun. English pronouns may have the same meaning whether complemented or not; this is the case for which, which presupposes some (unstated) definite set, just as each does. On the other hand, complementation may bring differences of meaning and, as mentioned earlier, what is the complemented equivalent of both what and who. Moreover, not every interrogative pronoun can be used as a determiner; this is not possible for English when, where, how, nor for the German equivalent of English what and who (was and wer). Such lexical and cross-language variation is to be expected.

Questioning the referent is the most straightforward function of an interrogative pronoun, but other aspects of meaning may also be questioned. One possibility is to question the possessor, which English allows thanks to the interrogative possessive whose, as in Whose car did you take? It’s tempting to think that this means something like ‘Who is x such that we’ll take x’s car’, but this is too simple an analysis because it predicts that if x is Mary we could answer simply Mary, whereas in fact we have to say Mary’s. The obvious explanation for this curious fact is that the choice of possessor impacts on the choice of referent (i.e. Mary’s car is different from anybody else’s car), so a better gloss on the meaning would be ‘Who is x and what is y such that we’ll take y and y is x’s car’. Perhaps because of this hidden complexity, many languages have no possessive interrogative; for instance, French doesn’t, so some other solution has to be found such as De qui avez-vous pris la voiture? (Of whom have you taken the car?). Once again, then, an English determiner does not necessarily translate into a determiner in another language.

Interrogative meanings can be even more complex. Some of them may be expressed with the help of ordinary syntax combined with extraction, with little of no impact on determiners; for example, Who did you buy a picture of? questions the identity of the person or thing portrayed. But other meanings cannot be expressed in this way. Suppose you want to question the extra distinctive properties that the referent adds to those of the general category defined by the common noun. In English we invoke nouns such as kind or type, as in What kind of car did you buy? But other languages offer other possibilities, such as Latin’s interrogative adjective qualis (which inflects just like its non-interrogative counterpart, talis ‘such’). The complexity in the English solution lies in the fact that what seems to have two complements: not only kind, but also car because both of these common nouns are singular and countable which demand a determiner. At the same time, car seems to be the complement of the preposition of. This pattern is taken further in examples like What colour (of) car did you buy?, where of is optional and colour can be replaced by any of a number of parameters such as size, price-range and make. Once again the syntactic argument suggests two complements for what, pushing the boundaries of the normal syntax of determiners. These are the facts; how they can be accommodated in a theory of syntactic structure is a question that goes beyond the scope of this chapter, though I should note that they are relatively easy to formalise in a network theory based on dependency structure such as Word Grammar (Hudson 2007; Hudson 2010).

Other languages offer different solutions to these functional challenges, such as the German was für meaning ‘what kind of’ (literally ‘what for’) as in (Durrell 1996:86).

(27) Sie können sich denken, in was für einer schwierigen Lage ich mich befand.

you can yourself think, in what for a difficult situation I myself found

You can imagine what an awkward situation I found myself in.

The syntactic interest of was für is that it has no effect on the case of the following noun and its dependents; so in this example, einer schwierigen Lage has dative case as demanded by in, regardless of the accusative normally demanded by für. And yet, it is was für that defines the subordinate clause as interrogative and explains why its phrase must be at the front of the clause, so it qualifies in some sense as the head of both the phrase and the clause. Whatever the analysis, this is a pattern we don’t have in English.

e. Person and status. Which of the deictic participants is included in the referent? English allows the plural first- and second-person pronouns to take complement common nouns, as in we linguists or you guys (an attempt, presumably, to compensate for the number ambiguity of you on its own). This is an easy extension of the apposition model provided by other determiners, but even in English

there are other possible solutions to the problem of specifying person. The most obvious one is the rather odd use of a possessive pronoun with an abstract common noun, as in your Majesty, your Holiness, your Eminence, and this pattern in turn leads into a new semantic area which isn’t covered by the English determiners, at least not as traditionally defined: social status.

English, like many other languages, provides a rich vocabulary of titles – terms which define a person’s social status in terms of conventional roles. An easy example is Mr (Mister), which has striking similarities to the. Like the, it cannot be used on its own, but has to be combined with a particular kind of noun, in this case a proper noun which is a family name, as in Mr Smith. But like the, it is also required syntactically by such names, though this requirement is context-dependent because it depends on the power and solidarity relations between the speaker or addressee and the referent (Hudson 1996:122–132). Since Mr selects a family name, rather than the other way round, and cannot occur without the family name, it is at least tempting to see Smith as the complement of Mr, just as book is the complement of the in the book. And finally, of course, if both Mr and the are heads, they are certainly nouns, though titles such as Mr probably are probably best treated as a subset of proper noun rather than as pronouns. If this analysis is correct, the category ‘title’ is justified in English as a close relative of ‘determiner’, and contains a surprisingly large number of members: Miss, Professor, Lord, Sir, and various intra-family titles such as Auntie and Grandpa. Like the determiners, the English titles are generally subject to a one-item restriction, and have their own idiosyncratic complementation rules – for example, Lord combines with a family name (Lord Quirk) whereas Sir combines with a given name (Sir John). And as with determiners, we find massive variation across languages – for example, both French and German allow multiple titles as in Monsieur le Professeur and Herr Professor Doktor.

f. Distributive quantification: The members of the referent set are distributed ‘upwards’ into a higher set of structures. For example, in Each of the ten competitors received a prize, the ten competitors are distributed across ten prize-receiving events. The same is true of Every competitor received a prize and All the competitors received a prize, so in each case the number of events matches the number of competitors. But as we have seen, although each and every are both determiners, all is not, which illustrates the fact that determiners are not the only solution to the challenge of signalling distributive quantification.

Other possibilities are:

‘Floated quantifiers’ such as each in Mary and Susan have each won one prize. Contrary to some earlier analyses (McCawley 1988:88–96) this can’t be explained as a determiner displaced from the subject for the simple reason that a coordinated subject doesn’t allow a determiner. The syntax of this construction is complex and involves the non-determiners all and both (but not every) and two possible ‘floated’ locations for each, as in Mary and Susan have (each) won one prize (each) (Hudson 1970).

Beja has a suffix -ka meaning ‘each’ which is attached to the distributed noun (without a definite article):

(28) tak-ka ka:m ibari man-each camel hasEach man has a camel

g. Negative-polarity quantification: The quantity is unknown, so compatible with any quantity defined by a higher structure. For example, in Did you win any prizes?, the number of prizes depends on the number of winnings, and likewise in We didn’t win any prizes. The distinctive characteristic of negative-polarity quantification is that it is not possible in ordinary positive sentences such as *We

won any prizes – or, perhaps more accurately, that in that context any has to be applied to an implicit set such as ‘any prizes that were available’ which preserves the ordinary negative polarity.

Many other languages allow negative-polarity quantification (Giannakidou 2011), but we hardly need to go beyond English in order to see that there is no special link between negative polarity and determiners. Standard lists of negative-polarity items (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:823) include adverbs such as ever and either, a host of idioms such as give a damn and even two modal verbs, dare and need (where typical modal properties are allowed in I daren’t do it but not in *I dare do it, though non-modal uses are always possible: I don’t dare to do it or I dare to do it). However, the problem solved by English negative-polarity determiners is more specifically to do with the number of referents of the noun, and even here there are alternative solutions. For example, Japanese uses a suffix –mo attached to a floating pronoun outside the affected noun phrase and its ‘case marker’ -o (Giannakidou 2011:15).

(29) Watasi-wa gakusei-o {dare-mo/hito-ri-mo} mi-nakat-ta.

I-topic student-accusative {who-MO/one-classifier-MO} see-NEG-PAST

I didn’t see any students.

h. Negative quantification. The quantity is zero, so this is projected up to any higher structure. For instance, in We failed no students, the number of students is zero, and so is the number of failings. English has one negative determiner, no, but as we have just seen, Standard English also offers an alternative solution: downwards projection from an external negative such as not onto a negative-polarity determiner, as in We didn’t fail any students. This is the preferred option when the noun concerned follows the negative marker, but since negation only projects downwards onto words that follow the negative this solution doesn’t work for negative subjects so the negative determiner is the only solution, as in No students came to the lecture. The Non-standard alternative of multiple negation works just as well because zero can project down onto a lower zero just as easily as onto an unspecified quantity, which is why so many languages have multiple negation (as in Nobody didn’t say nothing to nobody).

ConclusionsThe main conclusion is that the category ‘determiner’ is problematic, and cannot be taken for granted as a part of Universal Grammar. Even in English, where it was first identified, it is not a top-level word class but a subcategory of ‘pronoun’ (which in turn is a subcategory of ‘noun’), and even then it is only justified, as a category, by two areas of exceptionality (affecting form and meaning) which are not shared by all members. Without these exceptions, determiners would simply be pronouns that have a complement, which is no more a category than, say, pronouns that start with /n/. Even more importantly, the distinctive properties of English determiners are part of the grammar of English and may be absent from other languages.

Moreover, the class of determiners in English has tended to be used as a dumping ground for words (such as numbers) that are only partly similar to the core members and belong rightly in other classes. When these words are removed, virtually all determiners turn out to be regular pronouns, with virtually the same range of meanings as they have when used on their own. On the other hand, virtually all of these meanings can be expressed in other ways, instead of by means of pronouns, so it would be wrong to identify the ‘determiners’ of another language simply on the basis of their meaning.

These conclusions are important for any cross-linguistic research on determiners, but they don’t mean the end of such work. Rather, they justify a functional approach in which English-type determiners are seen as one solution (among many) to the functional problems of identifying noun referents and their role in sentence semantics. ‘Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.’ (Evans & Levinson 2009:429) In short, the aim of this work will be to explain the diversity found among human languages, and to celebrate it.

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