Determiners

[Erin]

Determiners

You need to know determiners to do well on the TOEFL grammar section.

We use determiners with nouns. The most common determiners are the, a, and an, but there are many more that are also important.

Here's a list of most of the determiners:

<ul>[*]the[*]a[*]an[*]another [*]no [*]'s[*]the[*]a[*]an[*]no [*]another [*]'s[*]some [*]any[*]my[*]our[*]their[*]her[*]his[*]its[*]another [*]no [*]'s[*]1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.[*]each[*]every[*]certain [*]its[*]another [*]no [*]'s[*]this[*]that[/list]

[Vaya]

Great! But some of them are repeated...

Renata

[Erin]

Yes, I repeat the ones that people tend to forget. Over my 10+ years of teaching TOEFL, I've seen, for example, that people forget that "no," "some," and "'s" are determiners, and will often miss questions related to those determiners, so I'm trying to reinforce their importance. I think I'll go back and make these important words red.

[erdtek]

WOW !!!

certain

certain is a determiner ! [8)] ! Interesting !

[jackie]

It's great. Thanks Erin

[Maratka]

Erin,

Please help. Partitive constructions have given me many troubles.
Typically, partitive noun phrase consist of count noun phrase [determiner] followed by Of-NP.

Most of the people appreciates/appreciate the complication of the situation.
At least half of the participants considers/consider the lectures very informative.

That suggests that the seemingly syntactic heads as most, no one, half, all, most are not the sole determiner in deciding the verb agreement. It appears that these nouns are 'number transparent' in that they allow the number of the oblique partitive NP to prelocate up to determine the number of the whole NP.

I'm a little bit confused. Could you please explain which variant is preferable? and why? At the present I consider both approaches to be legal in GMAT. [|)]:o

Thank you in advance.

Marat.

[Erin]

First, sorry for the late reply, I missed this moderated post.

The problem with some of these constructions is that many native speakers of SAE disagree about usage; I don't think there's any clear logic that's simple to grasp. For example, as has been discussed in this forum before, native speakers tend to say such things as "I have zero dollars in my account," "More than one of my friends is going to Stanford," or even "I have "one point zero" dollars in my account."

But that's the hard stuff. Rereading your question, it seems you're asking something a bit easier and certainly less controversial In general, the determiners in question take on the number properties of the noun to which they refer--half of the water is, half of the people are, etc.

BTW, this would be a good discussion for www.sentencecorrection.com , I think.