Determiners and Quantifiers - Differences

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 23 University of Wuppertal course: Hauptseminar Nouns and Noun Phrases language: English abstract: 1. IntroductionDeterminer and quantifier - two technical terms for two distinct word classes or does the latter denote a subset of the former? Paying attention to the linguistic discourse does not solve these questions at once. There are numerous differing and even contradictory notions of classification possibilities concerning the entities in question. The outcome of multiple approaches is that quantifiers denote a sort of subtype of the syntactic category determiner (Crystal 1995:222 Huddleston et al. 2002:356ff Longbardi 2001:581f Stowell 1991:47f Quirk et al. 1972:138f). In addition the concept was put forward that determiner and quantifier act as functional categories within the class of pronouns (Long 1961:46ff Radford 2004:45). Yet another opinion is held by Lyons (1999:298ff) who suggests that determiner phrases do not represent a word class but the grammatical category of definiteness. This brief summary of possible classifications only foreshadows the numerous similarities but at the same time the differences of the variety to be classified. Nevertheless the purpose of this term paper is to name and describe these differences. In order to do so a feature-based-analysis with respect to syntactic and semantic properties of the relevant members bearing the label determiners and quantifiers will be presented. On the basis of this outcome a conclusion will be drawn. However the overall expectation to classify one or possibly two unitary categories cannot possibly be met within the framework of this work. Before turning to the core of this term paper some abbreviated remarks have to be made in order to set a frame for the subsequent paper.