[Written for inclusion in: The Oxford Handbook of Determiners, edited by Solveiga Armoskaite & Martina Wiltschko, OUP 2019?]

Arguments against the universality of D and determiners Richard Hudson

1. What is universal?This chapter presents evidence against the universality of D – against the claim that, in some sense, and given suitably insightful analyses, the category ‘Determiner’ is available as a syntactic category in every human language. The evidence presented will also challenge the ‘Nominal Mapping Parameter’ which allows some languages to manage without determiners (Chierchia 1998a). The opposite case is presented in chapter xx, which will set the tone for the rest of the book, so I recognise that this suggestion will meet resistance. Any grammarian interested in the diversity of languages needs some kind of more or less fixed universal categories, otherwise we are faced with an ocean of unstructured particularity. I shall argue, however, that the only viable and defensible universals are semantic goals such as identifying, counting, quantifying and relating. What makes the diversity of languages so interesting is the diversity of ways in which languages solve the problems created by these communicative goals. In this view, the grammars of different languages are ‘stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition’ (Evans & Levinson 2009:429), with no other constraints on the kinds of solutions that are possible.

The modern discussion about whether all languages have determiners recalls the discussions that led the classical Greek grammarians to recognise ‘article’ as one of their eight parts of speech (Robins 1967:34), defined by Dionysius Thrax as ‘a part of speech inflected for case and preposed or postposed to nouns’, but that later led Latin grammarians to decide that although Latin shared all the other main parts of speech of Greek, it did not have articles (ibid:52-3). These discussions responded to the very obvious fact that Latin had no word to translate the Greek definite article (which was the only article in Greek), but it was complicated by the fact that Thrax’s ‘article’ was also used as a relative pronoun, so Latin grammarians could have taken the Latin relative pronouns as evidence for ‘articles’ in Latin. In the event, this temptation was neutralised by the similarities in Latin between relative pronouns and interrogative pronouns, so in the event the former were classified as pronouns, not articles. The moral of this historical tale is, of course, that good grammatical analysis gives top priority to the facts of the language concerned; if those facts produce a different alignment of categories from a language with a more established grammatical tradition, so be it – the differences are interesting and instructive.

This moral is especially relevant to determiners because they were invented in the twentieth century as a reaction to the previous Latinate grammars of English in which determiners were simply adjectives. Nowadays, English grammarians all welcome this innovation as a healthy recognition that when analysed in its own terms the grammar of English looks different from that of Latin. It would be deeply ironic if the result was a host of ‘Anglate’ grammars of other languages which forced those languages into the mould of English, complete with English-style determiners – and especially so if, as I argue below, even English has no determiners.

This chapter starts with a brief review of the equally brief history of determiners in English grammatical analysis, followed by two sections on the status of ‘determiner’ in English grammar: one suggesting that all the words standardly called ‘central determiners’ are, in fact, pronouns – much as the Greek article was – and one suggesting that many peripheral determiners belong to other word classes. The conclusion of these sections is that even English has no class of words that could be called ‘determiner’; if this is indeed so, and determiners don’t exist even in English, it follows that there can be no universal category of determiners. The next two sections focus on English, with one reviewing the meanings expressed by our so-called determiners, and the other reviewing alternative ways of expressing these meanings. The last full section surveys ways in which these meanings are expressed in other languages. The chapter concludes that neither English or any other language in the survey has a single syntactic category dedicated to expressing all these meanings; but of course it cannot exclude the possibility that some language does have such a category.

2. The history of determiners in English grammarAlmost 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 such as this from adjectives, and aligning them instead with the articles a and the, is one of the achievements of twentieth-century grammarians, and I certainly don’t want to question this. Indeed, I am proud to have had a part in persuading government and publishers in the UK to introduce this distinction into school grammars.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word determiner was used for the first time as a grammatical term by Bloomfield:

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 the similarity between this and a and the difference between both and ordinary adjectives, he still classified them as adjectives (albeit a distinct

subclass). His terminology and classification are accepted by at least some of his followers (Nida 1943:83).

However, nine years before Bloomfield’s book, the distinguished British applied linguist Harold Palmer had suggested a different analysis, in this case tied to the synonym determinative, in a pioneering book written for foreign learners of English (and with all examples in phonological notation).

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)

Notice that Palmer, unlike Bloomfield, considers and rejects the idea that determinatives are adjectives. Instead, he stresses their similarity to pronouns and proposes a distinct word class (not a subclass of some other class) which includes all the pronouns other than the personal pronouns, combined with a specification for each word as to how it can be used (with or without a modified noun).

It is instructive to consider which words Palmer treats as determinatives because he extends the class to include not only most pronouns but also a much wider range of awkward words which don’t qualify straightforwardly as adjectives:

articles and article-like determinatives: a, the, this~these, that~those, some, any, no~none (ibid:45-51)

article-like determinatives which are ‘less article-like than the foregoing’: every, each, both, either, neither, all, any, various, certain, such, other, same, whole, very, myself, yourself, etc. (ibid:51-58)

quantitative determinatives: o without of: much, many, more, less, all, some, any, no~none, the least, the slightest,

the most, some more, any more, no more, a little more, much moreo with of: a lot, lots, a quantity, quantities, a small quantity, a good deal, a great deal,

a large amount, a small amount, plenty; an ounce, two ounces, a pound, three pounds [and similarly for: pint, quart, galon, spoonful, cupful, glassful, pennyworth, shillingsworth, half a crownsworth, inch, foot, yard, half a yard, glass, cup, bottle, pot, bowl, jug, tube, plate, bag, sack; piece, lump, bit, block, sheet, drop, grain, cake, ball, stick, ear, blade]

numerical determinatives: o without of: one, two, …. two hundred and two, …; all, some, any, no~none, several, a

few, fewer, the fewest, many, more, most, some more, any more, no more, several more, a few more

o with of: a lot, a number, a good number, a great number, a small number, a couple, a heap, heaps, a mass, masses, plenty, both; a pair, pairs, a group, groups, a set, sets [similarly for: collection, series, bunch, company, batallion, regiment, army]

possessive determinatives: my~mine, your~yours, his, her~hers, its, ones, our~ours, their~theirs [possessives such as John’s hat or the man I saw yesterday’s father are excluded and treated either as genitives or a combination of NP with a postposition (ibid: 36-7)]

ordinal determinatives: first, second, third, etc.; next, last.

What is striking about this list is its sheer syntactic diversity, which is linked to the lack of a clear definition or set of defining characteristics of the category ‘determinative’. What do the and any have in common with blade and army? For Palmer, the similarity would perhaps lie in their ability to be followed by a common noun, with or without an intervening preposition, but then the same is true of a host of ordinary common nouns such as photograph or theory. Another noteworthy feature of the list is that it goes well beyond the idea of determinatives as a class of words, because many of his examples consist of a string of words (such as a great number).

Although Bloomfield ignored Palmer’s analysis, this analysis did influence some other grammarians. For example, Long observed that ‘The, a, and every are exceptional among the determinative pronouns in requiring stated heads.’ (Long 1961:486) But in this extract we notice that Long treats determinatives as a subclass of pronouns – yet another analysis, alongside Bloomfield’s determiner adjectives and Palmer’s determinatives. For Long, as for Palmer, a typical ‘determinative pronoun’ could be used either with or without a following common noun (which Long describes as the head), and Long notes just three exceptions. Unfortunately for the debate, these three exceptions happen to include the two most common determiners, the articles the and a, which don’t look at all like pronouns.

By the 1960s, Bloomfield’s terminology had triumphed but it was attached to Palmer’s class, so the word class called ‘determiner’ had separated from both adjectives and pronouns (Matthews 2007:62); how and why this change happened is unclear, but the lack of records suggests that there was no public debate about the relative merits of the alternatives. In 1957, Chomsky didn’t mention determiners and represented the in phrase-structure rules simply as ‘T’ (Chomsky 1957:26) but by 1965, presumably after learning about the neo-Bloomfieldian analysis, he recognises ‘Det’ as a major word class (Chomsky 1965). On the other hand, one research paper from that time confuses ‘determiner’ with ‘article’, claiming that the and a are ‘traditionally’ called definite and indefinite determiners (which is certainly false) (Smith 1964).

Given the very meagre research basis for the category ‘determiner’, it is hardly surprising that more recent research has been muddled and inconclusive, as the following sections show. However, what everyone does agree on is that some of the words variously called ‘determiners’ are, on the one hand, similar to the traditional articles but, on the other hand, different from ordinary adjectives, contrary to the previous Latin-based classifications. These points are both well founded on Bloomfield’s observation, quoted above:

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).

We all accept this generalisation, which we might call ‘Bloomfield’s rule’. As he points out, a word such as a or this is grammatically obligatory in examples like (1) and (2).

(1) They live in this house. (But not: *They live in house.)(2) They live in a big house. (But not: *They live in big house.)

His ‘certain types of noun expression’ would nowadays be expressed as ‘singular countable common nouns’, but otherwise this generalisation has survived well. Bloomfield’s rule, therefore, would now be expressed informally as in (3).

(3) Bloomfield’s Rule: A singular, countable common noun needs a ‘determiner’.The same rule seems to apply more generally to Germanic and Romance languages (Longobardi 1994). The modern category ‘determiner’, therefore, has its roots in the 1920s and 1930s and owes its existence to Bloomfield and Palmer.

3. Central ‘determiners’ are pronouns This section presents evidence against the standard assumption that ‘determiner’ is a word class in English. Instead it presents an analysis in which the words commonly treated as ‘central determiners’ are pronouns which have a common noun as complement. In this discussion the term determiner will be applied at first just to the clearest cases as defined by Bloomfield’s rule: the words that are required by a singular countable common noun. We will later expand the class a little.

Given Bloomfield’s rule as an identifying criterion, which words qualify as determiners? The following is, so far as I know, a complete list. (The asterisk is explained below.)

definite:o theo this, thato *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)

Most of the words listed can occur either with or without a common noun as complement, though as mentioned earlier there are four exceptions (the, a/an, every and relative whose) where the common noun is obligatory.

The words marked with an asterisk can arguably be reanalysed as pairs of words which share a single, merged, morphological realisation (much in the same way that du realises de le, ‘from the’, in French examples such as du village, ‘from the village’). For example, one could be reanalysed syntactically as *a one realised morphologically by one, to explain why this sequence isn’t available to match the one, this one and so on (as in the one thing I regret). In this reanalysis, the list of determiners would include a but not one, so there would be no precedent for including numerals.

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 ’s as a cliticized separate word at the end of possessive phrases such as the King of England’s (Jespersen 1894:317; 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 (attached to a preceding noun phrase which may, of course, itself contain a possessive, as in John’s brother’s wife’s name). Now, if this analysis is right, then it allows an analysis of all the possessive determiners 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 reduces the number of English possessive determiners to just one: ’S, which combines with a number of ordinary pronouns just as it combines freely with full noun phrases. In short, a possessive pronoun such as my is actually a combination of two pronouns: one ordinary personal pronoun and the possessive pronoun ’S. Moreover, the morphological patterns which allow this fusion can easily be extended to be sensitive

to the presence or absence of an overt complement, giving the familiar alternation of my~mine, your~yours and so on.

Having reduced the list of ‘Bloomfield determiners’ by reanalysing some as two syntactic words, we must extend the list slightly by recognising that some of these words also combine with plural common nouns, as in these books or what books, which admits these and those alongside this and these. We also add two plural personal pronouns that allow plural common nouns: we/us and you, as in we linguists and you students or you guys (which is rapidly turning in the UK into the default plural second-person pronoun). These can be justified because they are very obviously pronouns.

These reductions and additions leaves a list of eighteen words which pass the determiner test of Bloomfield’s rule; they are listed in (4) to (11).

(4) article: the, a/an, some(5) demonstrative: this/these, that/those(6) personal: we/us, you(7) possessive: ’S (8) interrogative: which, what, whichever, whatever(9) distributive: each, every(10) negative-polarity: any, either(11) negative: no, neither.

All of these words can combine with a common noun, and all except the, a/an and every (as noted by Long) can also be used without one, in which case they are standarly classified as 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. 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, such as himself and someone; so, pace (Postal 1966), it makes much more sense to treat determiners as a small subclass of ‘pronoun’ than to treat pronouns as a very large subclass of ‘determiner’; and however trivial this choice may seem, it makes a great deal of difference to the analysis. If Postal is right, then the category Det survives; but if I am right, ‘Det’ is just the name for pronouns that combine with a common noun. Assuming that the category of pronouns is well founded, the onus is on Postal’s followers to prove that an additional category, Det, is distinct.

My determiners-as-pronouns 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. As Palmer observed, this variation can easily be handled in the morphosyntax as syntactically conditioned allomorphy. For example, the pronoun my~mine 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~none shows exactly the same pattern. In short, there is a minor generalisation about pronouns that they may have two forms conditional on the presence or absence of an overt common noun – a generalisation which, as noted above, fits very comfortably

noun

pronoun proper noun

methe that

common noun

into the other morphophonological irregularities involved in mapping syntactic pairs such as me + ’S onto a single morphological word.

The other potential objection to the analysis is that some pronouns have different meanings 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 the sentence 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 the meaning of a pronoun.

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 only 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.

To see the consequences of this analysis, consider the very simple examples (12) and (13).

(12) I like this.(13) I like this book.

In both examples, this is simply a pronoun (more precisely, a demonstrative pronoun), and indeed it is the same lexical item in both examples. In one case it has a common noun as its complement, whereas in the other it doesn’t (or maybe this pronoun is covert). But of course, most pronouns cannot combine with common nouns: *me linguist, *who linguist, *himself linguist, and so on. The proposed classification is displayed in Figure 1, where the, that and me represent pronouns that must have a common noun as complement, that may have one, and that cannot have one. It is tempting to call those like the and that ‘transitive pronouns’ in recognition of their similarity to the class of transitive verbs, defined by their cooccurrence with a direct object, and to remind us that the status of ‘deteminer’ is no more central to modern grammar than that of ‘transitive’.

Figure 1: Determiners as pronouns

the big books

NP

NP

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, and similarly for 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 – or, in phrase-structure terms, the phrase headed by the common noun – is its complement (Hudson 1984:90–92; Abney 1987). But unlike the DP hypothesis, the analysis I am suggesting classifies the determiner as a noun, so the whole phrase is a noun phrase – just as had always been suggested until the DP was born. And returning to Bloomfield’s rule, what a singular countable common noun needs is not a determiner, but a pronoun – any pronoun which will accept a singular countable common noun as its complement.

If determiners are pronouns, and pronouns are nouns, and if determiners are heads, then all the following examples are noun phrases, with the underlined word as head:

(14) the big books(15) big books(16) these(17) me

In short, DPs are NPs. A schematic phrase-structure tree for (14) is shown in Error: Reference sourcenot found.

Moreover, we now have another generalisation about pronouns:

(18) Some pronouns allow or require a (phrase headed by a) common noun as their complement. Since pronouns are not a subclass of common noun, this generalisation doesn’t allow any pronoun to have another pronoun as its complement, which explains why Modern English (unlike, say, Italian or earlier varieties of English) doesn’t allow a sequence of determiners such as *this my house. An apparent exception to this generalisation is the possibility of combining core determiners with numerals, as in my two friends, but I argued above that numerals are not determiners (provided we analyse one house as syntactically *a one house).

There are two issues that remain. One is why Bloomfield’s rule is true. Why does a singular countable common noun need a determiner? I shall suggest a tentative answer to that question in section 5. The other is the status of gerunds such as his destroying the space ship, where the determiner his does not appear to head an NP. I have argued elsewhere (Hudson 2003) that gerunds are both nouns and verbs, and that the possessive is head of the whole phrase, just as in an NP, even though it also provides the verb’s subject. As far as I know this analysis is still viable, so gerunds fit into the analysis proposed here.

Figure 2: the big books is an NP

The point of the discussion in this section is to establish that the standard analyses, in which Determiner is a distinct top-level word class, are not obviously and inevitably correct. There is at least one coherent alternative which is compatible with all the available evidence, and which has been available for some decades (Hudson 1984:90–92; Hudson 1990:268–276). According to this analysis, what are standardly called ‘determiners’ are merely pronouns which have a common noun as their complement – an analysis which could be implemented quite easily in any modern theory of syntax. This analysis may be wrong, but until this has been demonstrated, it remains possible that even English does not have ‘determiners’ in the standard sense: It certainly has words which combine with common nouns in syntactically special ways, but these words are pronouns, and not a separate top-level word class.

4. Peripheral determiners are nouns or adjectivesResearch on determiners has been plagued by uncertainty about what counts as a determiner. For most grammarians, the term names a word class, but some people take it as a grammatical function or slot within the structure of the NP, with determinative as the name for the word class (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:354), while others use the same two terms the other way round (Quirk et al. 1985:253). One author distinguished the function ‘determiner’ from the class ‘deictic’, only to reverse the terms in later work (Halliday 1963:99). And of course, some grammatical theories reject the distinction between class and function (Müller:35), and with it the possibility of making any such distinction.

But suppose we focus on the word class, and agree to call it ‘determiner’. Even then we find great confusion and disagreement over the membership of the class. For instance, if we compare the large reference grammars of English:

ordinal numerals (e.g. second, twenty-third) are determiners (more precisely, ‘post-determiners’) for some (Quirk et al. 1985:260), but not for others (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:452).

complex cardinal numerals (e.g. two hundred and twenty six) are treated by some as determiners even though they are clearly not single words (Biber et al. 1999:259; Huddleston & Pullum 2002:356).

enough and sufficient (as in enough/sufficient money) are both determiners for some (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:396) while only enough is a determiner for others (Quirk et al. 1985:256) (and enough isn’t mentioned at all in Palmer’s giant list).

all is a determiner for some (Carter & McCarthy 2006:353) but a ‘predeterminer’ for others (Biber et al. 1999:258).

Such widespread disagreement over details should raise suspicions about the empirical and theoretical basis of the category, especially when we contrast it with a very similar category, ‘auxiliary verb’, where there is virtually no disagreement about which words it includes.

On the other hand, the disagreements and inconsistencies are themselves indicative of something positive: an area of meaning that has special links to the core determiners. If we can tease apart some of the main parameters in this meaning, we may be able to move towards a set of universal semantic functions that can be realised in a variety of ways, with English-style ‘determiners’ as just one of the possibilities. In order to establish these semantic parameters, therefore, we need to consider the periphery of the ‘determiner’ category as well as its core.

Most grammars recognise many more determiners than our modest list of eighteen in (4) to (11), so it is worth reviewing the words which do not qualify as determiners by the Bloomfield test. For example, most grammars classify numerals as determiners, in spite of the obvious fact that numerals combine in complex structures such as six hundred and forty two. These structures have their own syntax, including coordination, but at any point in the chain of numerals, an ordinary common noun is possible (six books, six hundred books, six hundred and forty books, six hundred and forty two books) so the simplest assumption is that the numerals themselves are common nouns which take other common nouns as complement (Hudson 1990:302–8).

The following list of borderline determiners is based on the one in a standard grammar (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:356), and includes my suggested alternative analyses (Hudson 1990:305–11):

universal quantifiers: all, both o 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 o = 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

o 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 o restricted common nouns or adjectives

much, many, few, little o both adjectives and nouns, to explain I didn’t see very much of it.

enough o a pronoun (to explain why it’s incompatible with a determiner: *my enough money

sufficient o 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. 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, so there is no such thing as a ‘DP. We now turn to the semantics of the English determiners and determiner-like words.

5. ‘Determiners’ have special meaningWhat meanings do these words have in common? As explained earlier. 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 discussion focuses on nouns and noun phrases, so we can start by asking what kinds of meaning they express. The discussion will assume the classical distinction between ‘sense’ and ‘referent’, whereby a word’s sense is its stable dictionary meaning, as modified by any dependents, while its referent is the highly variable entity to which it is applied. Thus in (19), the sense of a book is the general category ‘book’, while its referent is some particular book (currently unknown).

(19) I’m looking for a book. It will need to be a good one.The difference between sense and referent is particularly clear in anaphora, which may be based on either: in identity-of-sense anaphora, the anaphor borrows the sense, while in identity-of-reference anaphora it borrows the referent, as in (19), where it is bound by anaphora to the referent of a book, while one is bound to its sense.

The sense-referent distinction applies to the different sub-classes of noun:

common nouns (and their dependents) define the sense (e.g. ‘book’ or ‘big book’). proper nouns identify a referent by name (e.g. ‘Macbeth’). pronouns identify a referent in some other way.

This elementary analysis explains very simply why pronouns are used as determiners, and highlights a general characteristic of meaning shared by determiners and determiner-like words: they are concerned with referents rather than senses. For example, in this big book, the sense comes entirely from big book, and we know, from general principles, that the referent is an example of this category; but this greatly reduces the search space for the referent by specifying it as ‘nearby’. The whole phrase does not define a category of ‘nearby big books’, so there is no way that this meaning could be picked up by identity-of-sense anaphora; rather, it identifies an entity x such that x is not only a big book but also nearby. The intimate relation in English between determiners and pronouns is exactly as expected given that pronouns are specialised for identifying referents in useful ways; so they may be used either alone or with the support of a common noun. And that, of course, also explains why the pronoun/determiner is the head of the phrase; so, contrary to the traditional view, this book means ‘a nearby thing which, incidentally, is a book’, and not ‘a book which, incidentally, is nearby’.

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 properties other than those which it inherits from the sense. These meanings fall into three broad groups:

the referent’s identity (definiteness) the referent’s quantity (countability) the referent’s generalisability (quantification).

Identity is a matter of epistemology: who knows the referent? Quantity invokes a primitive classification of the world into individuals, sets and ‘stuff’ which is parallel to the much more sophisticated and detailed classification provided by the common noun. And generalisability is the possibility of generalising (as every book generalises to all examples of ‘book’). To make the discussion more concrete, consider (20).

(20) He ate every cake.What every tells us is that the individual referent of every cake is indefinite (no-one knows it), that it is countable (individual items made of cake) and that the claim about cake-eating generalises to the entire relevant set.

1. IdentityWe consider these three dimensions of meaning in turn, starting with identity. This varies according to who can identify the referent:

definite (the book): both the addressee and the speaker, possibly helped by further details in terms of:

o proximity (demonstrative: this book)o ‘possession’ (possessive: Mary’s book)o person (personal: we/us, you: you students)o anaphora (postdeterminers, adjectives: same, other, different)o rank (postdeterminers: first / third book)

indefinite (a book): maybe the speaker, but not the addressee o indefinite (a certain book): the speaker but not the addressee o indefinite (some: Some student has taken that book) neither speaker nor

addressee interrogative (which book): the addressee but not the speaker

A referent’s identity, in this sense, is its epistemic status: Definite referents can in principle be identified by the addressee, even if this involves some inference as in (21), where the key can be identified as the key to the car.

(21) I’ve got a car but I’ve lost the key. In contrast, indefinites can’t be identified by the addressee, so by marking a noun phrase as definite or indefinite we are telling the addressee whether it is worth looking for it in memory.

2. QuantityThe second dimension of meaning is quantity, which starts with three contrasts which decide how the referent should be measured: number, countability and ‘individuality’:

number: the inflected contrast between singular and plural. countability: the contrast between count and mass (uncountable) nouns, differing

grammatically in whether a numeral is possible (one book, two books, *one furniture) and in the contrast between many/few and much/little as well as some adjectives such as numerous and various.

individuality: the contrast between individuals and ‘aggregates’, a term covering both mass nouns and plurals (Gillon 1992; Chierchia 1998b); some determiners are limited to individuals (a, every, each), while others are limited to aggregates, whether singular or plural (some, more, enough, a lot of).

These contrasts interact to define just three categories:

individuals: singular, countable, individual (a book) stuff: singular, uncountable, aggregate (some furniture) sets: plural, countable, aggregate (some books)

When we consider quantity in relation to identity we find interesting interactions: definites are sensitive to number (e.g. this versus these) but not individuality, while the reverse is true of indefinites (e.g. a versus some); and countability is compatible with either definite or indefinite (as in the three books versus which three books). I have no explanation for this interaction, but it certainly deserves research.

This discussion raises the possibility of an explanation for Bloomfield’s rule: the reason why a singular countable common noun needs a determiner is because it might otherwise be interpreted

as a mass noun. The unmarked option in the quantity-based three-way classification of referent meanings as individuals, stuff or sets, is ‘stuff’ (a mass interpretation). The noun’s number inflection distinguishes sets from individuals and stuff, but its sense may not distinguish the latter; for example, egg can be taken as an individual (I ate an egg) or as stuff (I ate egg). As mentioned earlier, we take the individual/stuff contrast very seriously, so our ancestors adopted a partial grammatical solution to the uncertainty by making a determiner obligatory for an ‘individual’ reading. The solution isn’t perfect: it often doesn’t solve the problem because definite determiners are irrelevant (so the egg is still ambiguous between individual and stuff), and it forces a solution when there’s actually no uncertainty because the sense eliminates a mass reading (as in I ate a mouthful). But Bloomfield’s rule does eliminate some uncertainty, so it counts as a rather crude syntactic response to a semantic problem.

On this assumption, a noun such as egg is taken, by default, as referring to stuff, as in I was eating egg. But the default can be overridden in two ways: by inflection for plural (I was eating eggs), or by the addition of a determiner (I was eating an egg).

3. GeneralisabilityThe third, and last, dimension is generalisability, which is roughly the same as logical ‘quantification’ and applies where a referent is either a set or a member of a set. The question here is how, if at all, the proposition containing this referent as an argument generalises to the entire set. For example, I read every book implies a set of books, and although every book has a single book as its referent, the proposition generalises to all the members of this set. The possible values for this dimension are the following:

universal (all/both books) partitive (some books) distributed (every/each book) open (any/either book) empty (no/neither book)

Each of these ‘quantifiers’ implies a set, but all except the partitive include an alternative which limits this set in some way. This limitation is numerical in the case of both, either and neither, but for each it presupposes some known set; for example, in (22) and (23), each is better than every in relation to the sides of a coin because we all know that a coin has only two sides, whereas every is better in relation to the open-ended and unknown set of coins that needed polishing.

(22) I polished each/*every side of the coin.(23) I polished every/*each coin that needed it.

Once again there is an interaction between this dimension and the other dimensions. Since the analysis distinguishes the referent from the implied set, each of these elements can be classified separately. The set obviously has to be a set, but if it is specified explicitly, then it must be definite – indeed, this is a standard test for definiteness called the ‘partitive constraint’ (Jackendoff 1977:113). For example, some of the books contrasts with *some of books or *some of some books or *some of which books. Turning now to the referent itself, this must be either an individual (every book, any book, no book) or a set (all books, some books); but this set cannot itself be the explicit set for a larger phrase: *some of all books, *all of some books. According to the partitive constraint, then, it would seem that the referent is always indefinite while the set, if explicit, must be definite.

To summarise, therefore, a determiner or determiner-like word gives information about the phrase’s referent which combines with the sense to show what kind of referent the phrase has. The three dimensions on which referents are classified are identity, quantity and generalisability, each of which offers a more or less rich range of alternatives, but there are interactions between the dimensions which limit the freedom with which they combine. Some of these interactions are easy to explain, but others are more puzzling and deserve more research.

6. Determiner meanings in English syntaxBefore we leave English, it is important to be clear that the meanings and meaning contrasts just described are not limited to determiners, or even to determiner-like words at the start of the noun phrase. Even in English, these meanings can be expressed in very different ways. The discussion will follow the order of dimensions given above: identity, then quantity, then generalisability.

1. IdentityAn obvious example of ‘determiner’ meanings expressed by other means is possession, as in (24) and (25):

(24) A family in our road’s dog keeps barking.(25) The dog of a family in our road keeps barking.

These have exactly the same meaning, but the possession carried in (24) by the determiner/pronoun ’S is expressed in (25) by the preposition of – a very different syntactic construction.

Another example is the expression of indefiniteness with the bizarre help of the definite article and an adjective, as in the odd cigarette or the occasional puff of smoke. Of course, odd and occasional aren’t straightforward adjectives here, but they do seem to depend on the following common noun, and in other uses they are clearly adjectives, so they are more plausible as adjectives than as pronouns. These uses are interesting not only because apparent adjectives realise determiner meanings, but also because these adjectives override the expected meaning of the determiner the.

2. QuantityThe obvious example here is the adjective numerous, as in the numerous dogs in our neighbourhood. This is a straightforward adjective, allowing predicative use (the dogs are numerous) as well as attributive use, and yet it applies to the noun’s referent rather than to its sense: what is ‘numerous’ is the set of dogs, and not the individual members of that set, in contrast with, say, the fierce dogs, where it is the members, not the set, that are fierce. Having established that a clear adjective can do the job of a determiner, we may be able to include less clear examples such as various and several.

3. GeneralisabilityPerhaps the most obvious example of generalisability expressed without determiners is the use of ‘floating quantifiers’ as in the synonymous sentences in (26) to (28).

(26) Each student has given a seminar.(27) The students have each given a seminar.(28) The students have given a seminar each.

Early transformational analyses succumbed to the temptation of deriving the second two examples from the first by a movement transformation, but this approach only works where the plural subject might have contained each, and fails completely on examples like (29) (Hudson 1970).

(29) Amir and Fred have each given a seminar.

Moreover there are very specific constraints on the quantifiers that can ‘float’ in this way; every can’t float at all, and although both and all can also float to the second position, as in (27), they cannot reach the final position. This being so, it seems more promising to locate all the relevant information in the entry for each word, and to accept that the semantics will have to allow each to have the same semantic effect in all three positions.

Another non-determiner solution to the problem of expressing generalisability involves adjuncts such as sometimes or in some cases which are often used instead of indefinite determiners:

(30) Some people like cold weather.(31) People sometimes like cold weather.(32) In some cases, people like cold weather.

It is easy to see why generalisability can be expressed in this way; after all, if ‘x likes cold weather’ varies with x, then it will also vary from occasion to occasion depending on who x is; but taken literally, these sentences have different truth conditions because some people links variation to the identity of x, whereas the other sentences allow it to be linked to other factors, such as the weather or the time. Nevertheless, the adjuncts are often used as synonyms for the determiner, so we can assume that this option is allowed by the grammar.

These examples of syntactic diversity in the expression of determiner meanings in English set the scene for the next section which reviews the diverse ways in which the ‘determiner meanings’ found in English are expressed in other languages.

7. Determiner meanings in other languages By the end of section 3, this chapter had established a case for analysing the so-called determiners of English as pronouns, thereby removing any possible basis for the claim that Det is universal. However, it then analysed the meanings expressed by these words in terms of the sense-referent distinction and three dimensions on which referents could be distinguished by determiners. This provided an analytical framework of ‘determiner meanings’ which might be used in comparing languages. Typological comparison is clearly vital, but the typological programme defined in this way takes meanings as the independent variable, with syntax as the dependent variable and no assumptions about ‘finding Dep’ in the syntax.

It would be comforting if we could be sure that at least the meanings stayed constant across languages, even if the realisations varied; but this is something we cannot take for granted. For an easy example, we can contrast Greek and Latin, the languages with which we began, where Greek has a definite article but Latin does not; in Latin (and many other languages) it is clear that definiteness has a very much lower profile than in Greek or English. And for a second example, one of the most important variables in English grammar is the pervasive contrast between count and mass, which runs through the grammar and plays such an important part in the semantics; but this contrast plays a much smaller part in many other languages. Indeed, it could be described as an obsession of English grammar, which insists on distinguishing gravel (mass) from pebbles (count), or even wheat (mass) from oats (count), regardless of the objective facts. In contrast, the Maya language pays very little attention to such contrasts, and (arguably as a result) Maya speakers also ignore them (Lucy 1992; Hudson 1996:99–101). This example shows that even the meanings expressed may vary across languages.

The following is a list of the formal options that have been adopted in other languages for expressing determiner meanings:

1. Pronouns. Definiteness is often expressed, as in English, by means of personal pronouns, and in some languages the similarity to ordinary personal pronouns is 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).

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

On the other hand, demonstrative determiners in French are (at least at first sight) different from the corresponding pronouns: for determiners, the forms are 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.

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

In this case it is much less obvious that the form used before a common noun is a pronoun, though it’s possible that celui could be analysed as ce+lui - two syntactic words sharing one morphological realisation.

One variation on the pronoun theme is double realisation. On the one hand there are languages like Italian which require a definite or indefinite article before a possessive pronoun: il mio amico or un mio amico, meaning respectively ‘my friend’ and ‘a friend of mine’. And on the other, there are languages in which demonstrative pronouns can be repeated. One such language is the Cushitic language Beja/Tu Bedawye, which allows double demonstratives as well as article-demonstrative combinations (Hudson 1964:222). In this example, ‘msn’ stands for ‘masculine singular nominative’.

(35) u:-n u:-tak u:-n dib-yamsn-this msn-man msn-this fall-past.3sg‘This man fell.’

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.

2. MorphologyAnother way to mark definiteness is by means of affixes attached to the common noun. This is a well-known feature of Scandinavian languages; for instance, in Swedish huset means ‘the house’, with ‘the’ translated by the suffix -et. Moreover, when the noun has a preceding modifier, the definiteness is also marked by a preceding article, as in det stort huset, ‘the big house’ (Dahl 2004). The same solution is applied in the famous Balkan ‘Sprachbund’ (language area) which is especially interesting because the languages concerned seem to have borrowed from each other the idea of using a suffix while supplying their own suffixes. For example, the translation of ‘the man’ is burri in Albanian, bārbatul in Romanian, and (in phonological transcription) /maʒɔt/ in Macedonian, where in each case the marker of definiteness is the underlined suffix.

In the Scandinavian and Balkan languages, the marked option is definite, but this is not always so. In Classical Arabic, for example, indefinites are marked with a suffix -n and definites with a prefix al-, and a modifying adjective agrees for definiteness as well as gender, number and case (ns = nominative singular):

(36) al-kita:b-u al-kabi:r-u the-book-ns the-big-ns ‘the big book’

(37) kita:b-u-n kabi:r-u-n book-ns-indef big-ns-indef ‘a big book’

Another option for showing definiteness in the noun’s morphology is to link it to case marking, as in Turkish (Aissen 2000). In this language, 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).

(38) Hasan öküz-ü aldı. Hasan ox-acc bought ‘Hasan bought the ox.’

(39) Hasan bir öküz(-ü) aldı. Hasan one ox bought ‘Hasan bought an ox.’

Definiteness is not the only determiner meaning which can be marked morphologically. Another is the ‘distributive’ generalisability of English each and every. This is expressed in Beja/Tu Bedawiye by a suffix -ka as in (40) (Roper 1928:202).

(40) tak-ka ka:m ibari man-each camel has ‘Each man has a camel’

A further example of a meaning other than definiteness expressed morphologically is the open (or ‘negative polarity’) meaning of any, for which Japanese uses a suffix -mo attached to a floating pronoun outside the affected noun phrase and its ‘case marker’ -o (Giannakidou 2011:15).

(41) 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.’

3. Ordinary syntax‘Ordinary syntax’ is needed when a determiner meaning links two referents. The area of meaning where this is specially relevant is possession, which links two referents, the possessor and the possessed. This qualifies as a determiner meaning because in English it can be realised by the determiner/pronoun ’S, as in the King of England’s hat. As I have already noted, even English provides a syntactic alternative, the preposition of, and we shall see that other languages provide other solutions to the problem of expressing this relationship.

One solution is mere word order, as in Welsh. 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):

(42) Cŵn y cymdogion dogs the neighbours ‘the neighbours’ dogs’

However, other solutions involve morphological marking either on the head or on the dependent (Nichols 1986). Farsi has a similar arrangement to Welsh, with possessor nouns simply juxtaposed to the possessed, but the existence of the possessor is marked on the possessed noun (the head) by a suffix labelled here ‘pm’ for ‘possessor marker’ – an example of head-marking:

(43) barādar-e Maryam brother-pm Miriam ‘Miriam’s brother’

More familiar is dependent-marking using either a preposition such as of or a genitive case. 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). An alternative to case marking and prepositions is found in Beja/Tu Bedawye, which 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, and follows the modified noun, and the same is true for possessives, which are marked as possessives by a vowel suffix, -i.

(44) akra ka:m rihan strong camel I.saw ‘I saw a strong camel.’

(45) ka:m akra-:b rihan (= (44))(46) ka:m-i ragad rihan

camel-’s leg I.saw ‘I saw a camel’s leg.’

(47) ragad ka:m-i-:b rih-an. (= (46))Nearer to home, Slavic languages use a similar strategy of converting possessors into ordinary adjectives (Bošković 2005).

4. Special syntaxSpecial syntax may be required to express complex determiner meanings. This is often the case in interrogatives when it is the sense rather than the referent that is questioned. For example, German uses a very odd structure was für (literally ‘what for’) meaning ‘what kind of’ as in (48) (Durrell 1996:86).

(48) 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 that explains why the phrase containing it 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.

What we do have is the what kind of pattern, as in What kind of car did you buy? The complexity in the English solution lies in the fact that both kind and car are singular countable common nouns, so they both need a determiner, but only one determiner is available: what. Consequently, what must double up as head of both kind and car. 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 two common nouns seem to share the determiner 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).

5. AdjectivesAnother strategy for expressing some determiner meanings is by means of adjectives – the word class that English adjectives were assigned to until the determiner analysis was invented. One role for adjectives is to mark possession, as noted above under ‘ordinary syntax’. Another, however, is in adjectives created to solve the ‘what kind of’ problem in the previous subsection. In Latin, the translation for ‘what kind of’ was the word qualis, as in qualis homo, ‘what kind of man’. This word seems to be an adjective, just like its correlative talis, ‘such’ used in pairs such as Qualis eras, talis es, ‘As you were, so you are’. The adjective analysis fits the semantics, given that these words apply to the sense rather than to the referent.

6. ClassifiersThe area of determiner meaning called ‘quantity’ includes the distinction between count and mass, which looms very large in English grammar. Other languages make similar distinctions by means of numeral classifiers, words which combine with a numeral to classify the common noun in some way. For example, the Malayic language Minangkabau has classifiers that recognise semantic categories which include humans, nonhuman animates and elongated objects as illustrated in (49) to (51), where ‘clf’ stands for ‘classifier’ (Gil 2013).

(49) sa-urang padusi one-clf woman 'one woman'

(50) duo ikue anjiang two clf dog 'two dogs'

(51) tigo batang pituluik three clf pencil 'three pencils'

The semantic effect of a numeral classifier is similar to that of an English determiner such as an or every: it marks the referent as countable. For instance, the Mandarin word píngguǒ can be translated by any of ‘(some) apple’, ‘an apple’ or ‘(some) apples’, but a classifier (gè) allows it to combine with a numeral, as in sān gè píngguǒ, ‘three apples’ (ibid).

7. Partitive prepositions and casesOne of the strangest alternatives to determiners is the use of a preposition either alongside a definite article or on its own to signal an ‘aggregate’ referent – i.e. a referent which is either a mass or a plural set. The examples below are from French (Hawkins & Towell 2001:32), but this pattern is common across the Romance languages, using a preposition which otherwise means ‘of’ or ‘from’:

(52) Je viens de la ville. I come from the town.

(53) Je connais le maire de la ville. I know the mayor of the town.

(54) Je mange la viande. I eat the meat.

(55) Je mange de la viande. I eat of/from the meat. ‘I eat some meat.’

(56) Je mange de bonne viande. I eat of/from good meat. ‘I eat some good meat.’

There is no doubt that de in these examples is the same word throughout, because it shows exactly the same morphophonological merger with the masculine and plural articles le and les whereby de+le = du and de+les = des. Moreover, if the partitive de follows the ordinary preposition de, they merge into a single realisation.

(57) Je mange des fruits. [expected: Je mange de *les fruits.] I eat some fruit.

(58) Je déjeune de fruits. [expected: Je déjeune de *des fruits.] I lunch of/from fruit ‘I lunch on fruit.’

A phrase headed by a partitive preposition has exactly the same distribution as one headed by an indefinite determiner, so in some sense the preposition counts as a determiner – and yet it remains a preposition. This paradox remains to be resolved.

A similar paradox arises in languages that use a special case for aggregate referents. One such is Classical Greek, where Homer uses the expected accusative and the genitive with the same verb (‘drink’) in almost adjacent lines (Carlier 2007):

(59) haimatos ophra piō blood.gen in.order.that I.drink. ‘so that I drink blood’ (Homer, Odyssey 11, 96)

(60) epei pien haima kelainon after drink blood.acc black.acc ‘after having drunk the dark blood’ (Homer, Odyssey 11, 98)

Whether the aggregate meaning is expressed by a preposition or by a case, the problem remains the same: how to explain why this is grammatical in a context that otherwise demands an ordinary noun phrase or a different case.

8. ConclusionsThe main conclusion of this chapter is that the category ‘determiner’ is problematic, and cannot be taken for granted as a part of Universal Grammar. Even in English, there is a plausible analysis in which it is not a top-level word class but a subcategory of ‘pronoun’ (which in turn is a subcategory of ‘noun’); moreover, if the so-called determiners are simply pronouns that have a complement, ‘determiner’ is no more a category than, say, verbs that take a preposition as their complement, or pronouns that start with /n/. And, of course, if ‘determiner’ is not even part of the grammar of English, the language for which the category was invented, then there is no case at all for it being a cross-language universal.

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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