1367260110.5528Understanding Syntax

54Understanding syntaxb. den hungriga mus-enthe hungry mouse-def‘the hungry mouse’The suffix -en marks definiteness, and can co-occur with den ‘the’, as in (49b).The noun itself doesn’t have any ‘definiteness’ morphology in English. Manylanguages, including English, can distinguish definite from indefinite nouns byusing a separate functional element – an article, such as the definite article the orthe indefinite article a/an. Articles are members of a larger class of functional wordsknown as determiners. Some of the main subclasses of English determiners areshown in (50), with the determiners themselves in bold:(50) a. Articles: the paper(s); a problem; an eggb. Demonstratives: this paper; these papers; that egg; those eggsc. Wh-determiners: what colour(s); which paper(s)d. Quantifiers: some milk/eggs; each paper; every boy; all cases;no time; most eggs; few eggs; much time; any eggse. Possessive determiners: my child; her/his child; our child; Lee’s childf. Pronouns: we/us linguists; you boysThe reasoning behind classifying all these items as members of an overarchingcategory ‘determiner’ is that we can only put one of them in the single slot before anoun in English: ___N. For instance, we get this child, but not *this my child, or *thesewhich eggs. However, the situation is actually not quite as simple as this, particularlywith regards to the quantifiers (words like those in (50d), which specify quantity),because we do get phrases like my every wish, some of the eggs and so on, which havea more complex syntax.Note also that in (50e), examples of possessive determiners include whole NPssuch as Lee’s in Lee’s child, or my cousin’s child. These seem to fill the same positionas single-word possessive determiners, and we can certainly choose only one ofthem in the pre-noun slot: we don’t get *This is Lee’s her child. But if the ‘determiner’position can be a whole phrase, it again suggests that the situation is quite complexsyntactically.Finally, it might seem strange to suggest that pronouns such as we, us, you shouldbe placed in the class of determiners, along with words like some and the. But the factthat pronouns don’t co-occur with determiners (*the she) suggests that pronounsaren’t nouns. (Proper nouns – names – can’t generally take determiners in Englisheither, but they can in certain contexts: The Kim Jones I know has black hair; I canhardly recognize the London I once loved.) Interestingly, pronouns can often replacedeterminers, which suggests that they may indeed be in the same word class:(51) We/us linguists aren’t stupid. (Compare: These linguists …)I’ll give you boys three hours to finish the job! (Compare: those boys …)