PaulMatthews
Senior Member
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2016
- Member Type
- English Teacher
- Native Language
- English
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- Great Britain
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- Great Britain
May I ask two more questions to you, PaulMatthews?
1) EFL teachers tend to include 'determiner' as a part of speech. Is it fair to say that most schools of grammar do not do that?
2) What part of speech is, say, the word this? Is it also seen as a pronoun, but with identical dependent and independent forms. How about articles? What part of speech is the word the?
(Apologies to the OP and anyone else following this thread for my sidetracking.)
1) Here's what Geoff Pullum says about it:
The term "determinative" for the category of words like articles, demonstratives, and quantifiers is at least as old as A Grammar of Spoken English on a Strictly Phonetic Basis by Harold E. Palmer and F. G. Blandford (1939), and they take it from the French "adjectif determinatif". And "determiner" doesn't seem ever to have been a clearly defined lexical category. Huddleston and I like the appealingly mnemonic suffixal parallels: "adjective" and "determinative" are both categories (word classes); "determiner" and "modifier" are both functions.
It is most unfortunate that Quirk et al. used the terms the other way round; but they were needlessly going against Rodney Huddleston's earlier works, such as his Cambridge University Press textbook Introduction to the Grammar of English, and we are not aware of any precedent they were following.
2) "This" is a demonstrative determinative. Its functions differ according to its use in the clause:
DEPENDENT:
[This formula] can't be right. [pre-head determiner]
She is not usually [this late]. [degree modifier]
INDEPENDENT:
This can't be true. / All this is mine. ['fused' determiner-head]
3) The articles like "the" are determinatives that generally (but not always) functions as a determiner.
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