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A distal demonstrative exists in German, cognate to the English yonder, but it is used only in formal registers. [3] jenes Mädchen "yonder girl" Cognates of "yonder" still exist in some Northern English and Scots dialects; "This shop here" "That shop across the street" "Yon shop down the street" (that shop that is/used to be down the street)
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
In English, for example, the words my, your etc. are used without articles and so can be regarded as possessive determiners whereas their Italian equivalents mio etc. are used together with articles and so may be better classed as adjectives. [4] Not all languages can be said to have a lexically distinct class of determiners.
The key difference between adjectives and determiners in English is that adjectives cannot function as determinatives. The determinative function is an element in NPs that is obligatory in most singular countable NPs and typically occurs before any modifiers (see § Functions ).
Although English adjectives do not participate in the system of number the way determiners, nouns, and pronouns do, English adjectives may still express number semantically. For example, adjectives like several, various, and multiple are semantically plural, while those like single, lone, and unitary have singular semantics. [31]
The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive 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" (-'s). [a]
The English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. [1] Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct part of speech, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun , contrasting with common and proper nouns .
The Basque distal form (with infix -a-, etymologically a suffixed and phonetically reduced form of the distal demonstrative har-/hai-) functions as the default definite article, whereas the proximal form (with infix -o-, derived from the proximal demonstrative hau-/hon-) is marked and indicates some kind of (spatial or otherwise) close ...