Determiners in English

Determiners in English are one of the important structures and often appear in English tests. Therefore, let's learn about structures and how to use them in English with Englook!

1. Concepts

- Determiners is a word that comes before a noun or a noun phrase and before an adjective. Therefore, the determiner cannot stand alone but must be followed by a noun or a noun phrase.

- Determiners or demonstrative words are words that are often placed before definite nouns to refer to a specific or special person/event/thing that you are referring to.

2. Classification

Type of determiner	Listed	For example
- Article	a, an, the	The I saw a girl last night.
- Indicative determiners	this, that, these, those	Look at these flowers!
- Possessive determiners	my, his, her, your, our, their, its	My father works at a big insurance company.
- From only numbers	all, every, most, many, much, some, few, little, any, no…	We don’t have much money. We don’t have many eggs.
- Number of words	one, two, three, first, second, third,…..	I ordered two cakes. She won third prize.
- From the term Doubt	whose, which, what	Whose car did you borrow? Which books have you read?

3. How to use determiners

3.1. Article

- Articles are the most common determiners.

- Contains 3 words: a, an, the

- Articles are divided into two types: definite and indefinite articles.

	Indefinite article	Definite article
Use with	Singular noun	For all nouns (singular, plural, countable and uncountable)
Use when	The listener/speaker does not know anything about the object being talked about or only knows in general terms	When the speaker/listener already knows who the person is talking about
For example	He met a girl last night.	The girl is kind and lovely. The red wine.

3.2. Indicative determiners

Demonstrative determiners are used to indicate how far or close someone is to the speaker.

Contains 4 words: this, that, these, those

	Near the	Shah
Singular	This	That
Many	These	Those

For example:

I like this color.

That man over there looks scary.
These books belong to mine.
Can you see those buildings?

3.3. Possessive determiners

Possessive determiners, aka Positive adjectives, used to indicate that someone is “own" something.

Contains 7 words: my, your, his, her, its, our, their

For example:

We sold our house last week.
Your wish is my commend.
Her dress is from the latest collection.

Attention:

+ Do not confuse Possessive Determiners, also known as Possessive Adjectives, with Possessive Pronouns.

+ Distinguishing ITS from IT'S (= IT + IS):Eg:

The cat licks its fur.
It’s raining. = It is raining.
Look at the train! It’s comming. = It is comming

3.4. From only numbers

- Quantity words are words that describe the quantity of a noun phrase.

Only used with countable nouns

Only used with uncountable nouns

Used for both types of nouns

- a few

- a number of

- several

- many

- a majority of

- every

…

- a little
- a great deal of
- a large amount of
- much

…

- all- a bit of

- a lot of / lots of

- no / none

- not any

- plenty of

- any

- some

…

For example:

I buy every book from this author.
All students from this school passed the entrance exam.
She had no money.

3.5. Determiner: Enough

Enough

- Formula used with the word Enough: Enough + noun

In case “enough” is an adverb, we have the following formula:

Adjective / Adverb / Verb + Enough

For example:

There are enough chairs for everyone here. → noun “chair”
I hadn’t trained enough for the job. → verb “train”
This house isn’t big enough for us. → adjective “big”
We didn’t leave early enough. → adverb “early”

3.6. Number of words

- Includes counting numbers and ordinal numbers:

+ Count: one, two, three,….

+ Serial number: first, second, third,…

For example:

There are about two hundred (200) people on the street.
He has just made his second score.
The first three people who answer correctly will get a present.

3.7. Interrogative determiner

- Contains 3 words: which, what, whose

.+ Whose used to express the idea of "belonging to someone". Whose often used in sentences related to Relative Clauses– Relative pronouns.

+ What Used to ask for specific information about something.

+ Which also used to ask for specific information about something, but from a fixed set. (the questioner had a certain number of options and asked the listener which one he liked)

For example: