A word (such as a, an, the, my, their) that signals the approach of a noun: the newly mown hay.
one of a limited class of noun modifiers that determine the referents of noun phrases
an ARTICLE (a/the), DIESER-WORD (this/that) or EIN-WORD (his/my) that indicates (determines) the gender and case of a noun
a primitive syntactic category (a terminal node in the grammar) so we check whether the first word (John) belongs to that category
a word that belongs to a class of noun modifiers
a word that determines or qualifies the meaning of a noun by expressing such concepts as quantity or definiteness
a word that functions to pre-modify and specify a particular noun, e
A word such as a, an, the, this, that, these, used before a noun to limit its meaning in some way e.g. Those books are mine.
a word which is used before a noun or noun phrase to modify it, i.e. to make clear which particular person or thing is meant or to give information about quantity, e.g. 'the'/'my'/'Liz's'/'this' computer, 'both' computers
This is a word used before a noun which identifies what the noun refers to. Words like my, her, this, that, what, which, whatever, either, other, another, some, any, both, many, much, every, enough, no et-cetera are determiners.
A grammatical element qualifying a noun which expresses a very general notion of number, quantity or deixis. Articles, numerals, demonstratives, quantifiers and possessives belong to this category.
They are used at the beginning of a noun group. E.g. The, a, some , my ...
A determiner is word (such as this or that), an article or a number that refers to a noun phrase. For example: Look at this picture. Look at that UFO
A functional word that introduces a Noun--e.g., A/The/this/that/my/one etc. Determiners house all functional features relevant to the Noun--e.g., Definiteness, Person, Case and Number.
A syntactic category that includes the definite article the, the indefinite article and its variant an, the demonstratives this and that, and ordinary and reflexive pronouns. English also has a silent determiner, marked by ___ in (1) below, which resembles some in that it can be used with both mass nouns and plural count nouns (see Nouns for more information on count nouns and mass nouns). I see ___ rice on the table. I heard ___ lions out in the bush last night.
Determiners occur before NOUNS and indicate the kind of reference which the noun has: the boy bus our car these children both hospitals See also
A word which is used before a noun to show which particular example of the noun you are referring to. In the phrases 'my first boyfriend' and 'that strange woman', the words 'my' and 'that' are determiners.
For the word class, see Determiner (class).