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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

References


DET in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]