Scribd
Upload
10 views4 pages

Determiners Reviewed 2

Uploaded by

xxtwumasi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
10 views4 pages

Determiners Reviewed 2

Uploaded by

xxtwumasi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

Determiners

Christophe Parisse, Christelle Maillart

To cite this version:


Christophe Parisse, Christelle Maillart. Determiners. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Human Communi-
cation Sciences and Disorders, 2019, pp.578-579. �10.4135/9781483380810.n188�. �halshs-01666846�

HAL Id: halshs-01666846


https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01666846v1
Submitted on 18 Dec 2017

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est


archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de
teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés.
Determiners
Determiners are grammatical elements that characterize nouns and modify them or make
them refer to specific objects or actions. For example, in English:

This problem is complex.

“This” is a determiner that goes with “problem”. Together, they form a noun phrase. “This”
indicates that “problem” refers to some problem that was raised or mentioned just before in
the discourse.

This entry will present the different types of determiners. Then it will explain how they are
acquired by children and what types of difficulties children with language impairment have
with determiners. We will not give an exhaustive description of determiners, for lack of
space, but will focus on the most frequent determiners found in language acquisition.

Determiners, by definition, are always attached to a noun. They are not used in isolation. If
this is the case, then it is not a determiner but a pronoun (see “Nouns and pronouns”). For
example, in “this is complex”, “this” is a pronoun that can refer to many things, and not
necessarily to nouns. There are many languages where determiners differ from pronouns.
This is the case in English for some determiners. For example, “your” in “your book” is a
determiner and “yours” in “this is yours” is a pronoun. The difference between categories
makes for a more transparent grammar, but in native use, the ambiguity is not problematic,
as determiners are automatically integrated with the noun when listening to or producing
language. In English, determiners always appear before the noun that they determine. In
other languages, they can appear after the word. In yet other languages, they are tightly
integrated in the nouns, as prefixes or suffixes, and not separate words as in English.

In English, determiners come in different subtypes:


§ articles (the, a, an)
§ demonstratives (this, that, …)
§ possessives (my, your, …)
§ quantifiers (some, much, …)
§ numbers (one, two, …)
§ interrogatives (which, whose)

Articles
Articles are the most frequent type of determiners in English. They are not present in every
language. They are used in English to oppose reference to specific material (definite article
such as “the”) to reference to generic material (indefinite article such as “a” or “an”). Most
of the time, they are used for countable things only, and not for uncountable material,
where no determiners are used. However, exceptions exist in idiomatic expressions.
In many languages, the definite article comes from the diachronic transformation of a
demonstrative determiner (see below) and the indefinite article comes from a
transformation of the numeral “one”. These transformations did not occur in all languages
which explains why, in many languages of the world (for example Russian), there are no
articles at all, though demonstratives and numbers can be used instead of articles whenever
necessary.

Demonstratives
Demonstratives are words that are used to determine what the nouns are referring to. For
example, “this problem” in the example above, refers to a problem that was just talked
about in the discourse. This is called deictic reference, which can be spatial, temporal, for
real-world objects for example, but also for language elements within the discourse. The
distance referred to can have two values, such as the English “this” and “that”, which
correspond to proximal and distal reference. Some languages use three values, proximal,
medial and distal, such as the Spanish “esse” (this), “este” (that), “aquel” (far).

Possessives
Possessives are words that indicate the people whom an object, a quality, or a property,
belongs to. Possessives can take all the persons that are found in verbs and personal
pronouns: 1st person singular or plural (the speaker(s)), 2nd person singular or plural (the
person(s) the speaker is talking to), 3rd person singular or plural (can refer to anything but
the speaker and the interaction partner). For example in English, the singular possessives are
“my” (1st person), “your” (2nd person), “his”, “her”, “its” (3rd person).

Development of determiner forms and disorders with the use of determiners


In languages that have articles, such as Italian, French, or English, articles are by far the most
frequent determiners. This explains why they are produced very early by young children.
English-speaking children use articles at the onset of the multiword stage, between 18 and
24 months of age. At the age of 36 months, children supply nearly 90% of determiners in
obligatory contexts. This also explains why articles are not the category that is the most
problematic for children with language impairment.
However, there are differences between languages with a similar high frequency use of
determiners. For example, Italian- and French-speaking young children produce articles
systematically at an earlier age than English-speaking children. The difference between these
languages can be explained by differences in phonology, as proposed by Leonard’s Surface
model. In Italian and French, the salience of the syllables that make the articles is high, so
the articles are easy to reproduce. As suggested in the Surface model, the reproduction of
the article is not costly, so they are produced easily. This is true for normally-developing
children as well as for children with specific language impairment.

Possessives, and demonstratives especially, appear much later than articles in language
development. For example, in French, whereas the article is productive by age 2;0, the first
use of the possessive does not occur until 2;6. The number of possessives produced by
children is more than 10 times smaller than the number of articles produced.
Demonstratives are even more infrequent, as they are 10 times more infrequent than
possessives, and do not appear before age 3;6.

Christophe Parisse1 and Christelle Maillart2


1: Modyco, Inserm, CNRS & University Paris-Nanterre, France
2: University of Liège, Belgium
Further readings
Abu-Akel, A., Bailey, A.L. & Thum, Y.-M. (2004). Describing the acquisition of determiners in
English : a growth modeling approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 33, 5, 407-
424.
Leonard, L. B. (2014). Children with Specific Language Impairment. Second Edition. MIT
Press.
Parisse, C. & Le Normand, M..T. (2006). Une méthode pour évaluer la production du langage
spontané chez l’enfant de 2 à 4 ans, Glossa, 97, 10-30.

Cross references
Grammatical Development
Language disorders in children,
Morphology
Adjectives and Adverbs
Nouns and Pronouns
Syntactic Disorders
Syntax and Grammar

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy