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<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US">
Similarly as ‘adverb’, ‘determiner’ may be an interlingual
category which, by its traditional use(s), is internally
heterogeneous, so if you tried to define it, you would have
a janus-faced problem:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US"> Traditionally, ‘determiner’ comprises, as core
instances!, categories which usually differ markedly in their
distribution.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US"> ‘Determiner’ is probably a prototypical concept.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US">
Ad 1: As far as I know, demonstratives and articles are the
clearest
cases of determiners. In several languages which have both, they
differ in their distribution in that articles only occur as
subconstituents of NPs while demonstratives (like other pronouns)
can
constitute an NP.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US">
Ad 2: If ‘determiner’ is a typical interlingual category, it is a
‘hybrid’ category, i.e., it is constituted both by functional and
by structural features. </p>
<ol type="a">
<li>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US"> The basic functional feature is reference
fixation (to be explicated …). </p>
</li>
<li>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US"> The structural features would at least comprise
the conditions</p>
</li>
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<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US"> that a determiner be a grammatical formative</p>
</li>
<li>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US"> that it form a nominal syntagma (typically, an
NP) together with a nominal (independently of other contexts
in which it may be found additionally).</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm"
lang="en-US">
If this were applied to a language in order to identify its
determiners, then in many a language possessive pronouns would
come
under the category. If one wanted to exclude them, one could
specify
the functional criterion. Then articles would be prototypical
determiners, possessive pronouns might be peripheral to the
category.</p>
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lang="en-US">
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