• 5-minute read
• 6th March 2017

Determiners and Common Mistakes to Avoid

A ‘determiner’ is a word that we can use in front of a noun to help identify it or tell us something about it. Most determiners fall into one of four categories:

• Articles (i.e. the, a, an)
• Demonstratives (i.e. this, that, these, those)
• Possessive determiners (i.e. your, my, his, her, its, their, our)
• Quantifiers (e.g. many, few, some, all)

For advice on how to use these words in your writing, see our guide below.

Definite and Indefinite Articles

Articles atell us whether a noun is specific or unspecific. If we’re referring to a specific thing, we can show this by using ‘the’ (i.e. the definite article):

I am going to the park later.

Here, ‘the’ shows us that the speaker is referring to a specific park, not just any park. Were we referring to something generic or non-specific, though, we’d use ‘a’ or ‘an’ instead (i.e. the indefinite articles):

I want to buy a new book.

In this case, we use ‘a’ before the noun phrase ‘new book’ to show that the speaker does not have a specific book in mind.

Possessive Adjectives

Possessive determiners – or possessive adjectives – tell us who or what owns or possesses a noun. In English, the words we use to do this in various cases are ‘your’, ‘my’, ‘his’, ‘her’, ‘its’, ‘their’, ‘our’, and ‘whose’.

If someone says ‘my shoes’, for instance, ‘my’ tells us who the shoes belong to.

Demonstrative Determiners

Demonstrative determiners – also known as demonstrative adjectives – indicate a relationship between the speaker and a noun. Like the definite article, they show us when a noun refers to a specific thing. However, these words are even more specific, as they work a bit like pointing at an item in real life.

The four demonstratives in English are ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’ and ‘those’. The correct term to use will depend on proximity (i.e. how close or far away something is). This is most evident with physical distances, but the same can apply to figurate distances.

The other key factor is whether the term being modified is singular or plural:

For example, if someone says ‘this hat’, we know they mean ‘the hat right here’. If they said ‘that hat’, by comparison, we’d know they mean a hat further away.

Quantifiers and Numbers

Quantifiers are words that tell us how much of something there is. Common examples include words like ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘many’, ‘few’, ‘any’, and ‘several’:

I have many friends in Germany.

There are some holes in your socks.

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Numbers can also be quantifiers, telling us how many of something there is:

She has two large dogs at home.

He read 153 books last year.

Numbers only count as quantifiers when they appear before a noun, though.

Common Errors

To finish this post, we will look at some common errors related to determiners.

Mixing Up ‘A’ and ‘An’

Most native speakers know how to use indefinite articles (i.e. ‘a’ and ‘an’) intuitively. But they can be confusing if English is not your first language. The key is that the correct term to use depends on how the following noun sounds:

• Use ‘a’ before nouns that start with a consonant sound (e.g. a book, a union)
• Use ‘an’ before nouns that start with a vowel sound (e.g. an egg, an hour)

Remember, too, that it is the sound at the start of a word that makes the difference, not the letter itself (e.g. ‘a union’ is correct before ‘union’ starts with a ‘y’ sound).

Countable and Uncountable Nouns

There are rules about the determiners to use with countable and uncountable nouns. This is because we treat nouns that can be pluralised differently from those that cannot. One issue here relates to articles:

• ‘The’ can be used with either countable or uncountable nouns.
• ‘A’ and ‘an’ can only be used with countable nouns.

We can’t say ‘a sand’, for example, because ‘sand’ is an uncountable noun and cannot be referred to singularly. Instead, we’d have to use a plural determiner like ‘some’ or specify ‘a grain of sand’, adding the countable noun ‘grain’ before ‘sand’.

Other determiners where there’s an important distinction include:

Using Two Determiners in a Row

Another common error is using two determiners in a row. For example, it would always be wrong to say, ‘I kicked my a football.’ This is because ‘my’ and ‘a’ both help to identify the noun, but do so in different ways.

There are some cases where you can use two determiners with a single noun or noun phrase, such as  using quantifier and a possessive adjective in the same sentence. However, if you do this, you need to separate them with a preposition:

Would you like some my chips? – Incorrect

Would you like some of my chips? – Correct

Here, we use ‘of’ to separate ‘some’ and ‘my’. Make sure to check carefully if using more than one determiner in a sentence.

Proofreading for Grammar

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