DET: determiner
Definition
Determiners are words that modify nouns or noun phrases and express the reference of the noun phrase in context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc.
Note that the DET tag includes (pronominal) quantifiers (words
like many, few, several), which are included among determiners in
some languages but may belong to numerals in others. However,
cardinal numerals in the narrow sense (one, five, hundred) are not
tagged DET even though some authors would include them in
quantifiers. Cardinal numbers have their own tag NUM.
Also note that the notion of determiners is unknown in grammars of
some languages (e.g. Czech); words equivalent to English determiners
may be traditionally classified as pronouns and/or
numerals in these languages. In order to annotate the same
thing the same way across languages, the words satisfying our definition
of determiners should be tagged DET in these languages as well.
For instance, [en] this is either pronoun (I saw this
yesterday.) or determiner (I saw this car yesterday.) Its
Czech translation, [cs] tohle, is traditionally called pronoun in
Czech grammar, regardless of context. To make the annotation parallel
across languages, it should be now tagged PRON in Tohle
jsem viděl včera. and DET in Tohle auto jsem viděl včera.
Usually a nominal allows only one DET modifier, but there are occasional cases of addeterminers, which appear outside the usual determiner, such as [en] all in all the children survived. In such cases, both all and the are given the POS DET.
Examples
- articles (a closed class indicating definiteness, specificity or givenness): a, an, the
- possessive determiners: my, your, his, her, its, our, their
- demonstrative determiners: this as in I saw this car yesterday.
- interrogative determiners: which as in “Which car do you like?”
- relative determiners: which as in “I wonder which car you like.”
- quantity/quantifier determiners: indefinite any, universal: all, and negative no as in “We have no cars available.”
References
DET in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]