Determiners

Determiners are words like a, my, this, that, some, all, both, either, every, enough and several. They come at the beginning of noun phrases, but they are not adjectives.

There are two main groups of determiners.

Group A determiners

Group A determiners (also called pre-determiners) help to identify things.

Examples are:

articles: a/an, the
possessives: my, your, our, his, her, its, their, one’s, whose
demonstratives: this, that, these, those

We cannot put two Group A determiners together.

Group B determiners

Most of these are ‘quantifiers’: they say how much or how many we are talking about.

Examples are:

some, any, no
each, every, either, neither
much, many, more, most; a little, less, least; a few, fewer, fewest; enough; several
all, both, half
what, whatever, which, whichever
one, two, three etc.

We can put two Group B determiners together if the combination makes sense.