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Most determiners are very basic in their morphology, but some are compounds. [1]: 391 A large group of these is formed with the words any, every, no, and some together with body, one, thing, or where (e.g., anybody, somewhere). [1]: 411 The morphological phenomenon started in Old English, when thing, was combined with some, any, and no.
The English language has a number of words that denote specific or approximate quantities that are themselves not numbers. [1] Along with numerals, and special-purpose words like some, any, much, more, every, and all, they are quantifiers. Quantifiers are a kind of determiner and occur in many constructions with other determiners, like articles ...
[1] [2] Examples in English include articles (the and a), demonstratives (this, that), possessive determiners (my, their), and quantifiers (many, both). Not all languages have determiners, and not all systems of grammatical description recognize them as a distinct category.
Indefinite pronouns are associated with indefinite determiners of a similar or identical form (such as every, any, all, some). A pronoun can be thought of as replacing a noun phrase, while a determiner introduces a noun phrase and precedes any adjectives that modify the noun.
Some nouns can be used indifferently as mass or count nouns, e.g., three cabbages or three heads of cabbage; three ropes or three lengths of rope. Some have different senses as mass and count nouns: paper is a mass noun as a material ( three reams of paper , one sheet of paper ), but a count noun as a unit of writing ("the students passed in ...
In logic, a quantifier is an operator that specifies how many individuals in the domain of discourse satisfy an open formula.For instance, the universal quantifier in the first order formula () expresses that everything in the domain satisfies the property denoted by .
Some theories of grammar use the word "numeral" to refer to cardinal numbers that act as a determiner that specify the quantity of a noun, for example the "two" in "two hats". Some theories of grammar do not include determiners as a part of speech and consider "two" in this example to be an adjective .
The personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive Germanic case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive or English possessive" (-'s ...