What is a Determiner?
Determiners are one of the nine parts of speech. They are words like the, an, this, some, either, myor whose. All determiners share some grammatical similarities:
- Determiners come at the beginning of a noun phrase, before adjectives.
- Determiners limit or “determine” a noun phrase in some way.
- Many determiners are “mutually-exclusive”: we cannot have more than one of them in the same noun phrase.
- If we do have more than one determiner, they go in a very specific order.
Look at these example noun phrases. The first word in each noun phrase is a determiner:
- the dog
- those people
- some brown rice
- either side of the road
- seven pink elephants
- your oldest child
- which car