Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 15, 2015 7:40:00 GMT 5.5
Let us consider the noun phrase in (1)
(1) a man / the man
What word class do a and the belong to here?
[HASH] As adjectives?
[HASH] As determiners?
Well, to figure this out, let us consider the phrases in (2) and compare them with the corresponding numbers in (3).
2 (a) careful, suspicious men(b) men are willing(c) very careful men3 (a) *a, the man (or, the, a man)(b) *man is a/the(c) *very a/the man
We can make these observations:
(i) Adjectives can be stacked (combined) before the noun as shown in 2(a) while a and the cannot be combined this way (i.e., before the noun) or in any other way, as 3(a) shows.(ii) Usually, adjectives can follow copular verbs such as be, seem, and remain, etc., as DESCRIPTORS (or complements); however, this is not possible for a and the.(iii) While adjectives can be preceded by intensifiers or toners like very and quite, a and the cannot.
Moreover, adjectives such as careful and suspicious have clear descriptive (lexical) meanings, a and the don't have such lexical meanings. All they contribute, meaningwise, to the phrases they occur in is 'indefiniteness' or 'definiteness'.
Thus, it is reasonable to assign a (and its phonetic variant an) and the to a word class distinct from that of adjectives because their distributional and semantic properties are sufficiently different from those of adjectives.
Interestingly, there are a number of other words which behave very much like a and the, and they are assigned to a distinct word class, DETERMINERS.