Determiners are words which quantify or identify nouns. These include articles, quantifiers, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns. (Note that many languages lack one or more of these types of determiners.) A noun, or noun substantive, is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ... An article is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of reference being made to the noun. ... In language and logic, quantification is a construct that specifies the extent of validity of a predicate, that is the extent to which a predicate holds over a range of things. ... Demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ... A possessive pronoun is a word that attributes ownership to someone or something without using a noun. ...

In most Indo-European languages, determiners are either independent words or clitics that precede the rest of the noun phrase. In other languages, determiners are prefixed or suffixed to the noun, or even change the noun's form. For example, in Swedish bok "book", when definite, becomes boken "the book" (suffixed definite articles are common in Scandinavian languages). Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ... In linguistics, a clitic is a word that syntactically functions as a free morpheme, but phonetically appears as a bound morpheme; it is always pronounced with a following or preceding word. ...

In some constructions, such as those which use the names of school subjects ("Physics uses mathematics"), a determiner is not used. This condition is called the "zero determiner" instance.

X-bar theory contends that every noun has a corresponding determiner. In a case where a noun does not have a pronounced determiner, X-bar theory hypothesizes a presence of a zero article. X-bar theory is a component of linguistic theory which attempts to identify syntactic features common to all languages. ... X-bar theory is a component of linguistic theory which attempts to identify syntactic features common to all languages. ... A zero article is an unpronounced article present in some languages. ...

English determiners

• Articles: a, an, the
• Quantifiers: all, few, many, several, some, every
• Possessive pronouns: her, his, its, my, our, their, your
• Demonstratives: this, that, these, those

See also: English grammar English grammar is the study of grammar in the English language. ...