Post-Determiners

I have been discussing regular determiners and pre-determiners in my previous posts . In this concluding post on determiners I will be discussing post- determiners and their usage in English sentences .

Post-determiners, as their name suggests, come after regular determiners in a Noun Phrase .They precede nouns but follow regular determiners in a Noun Phrase .

Cardinal numbers like one. two three .four etc and ordinal numbers like first. second third etc are post-determiners . Examples

The first three apples

The first six boys

Please note ordinals always precede cardinals General ordinals like last, next other ,another etc are also post-determiners .

The important thing for an English learner to note is the order of various determiners in a pre-modification structure .

1 The first three boys

2 The next four days

3Another interesting case

If there is an adjective in the Noun Phrase it immediately precedes the noun , but follows post-determiners .

1 The first three famous novels

2The last six happiest days

Quantifiers like many , few, several , much , little etc are post-determiners and they precede nouns in a Noun Phrase

Determiners ( unlike adjectives ) have a general tendency not to co-occur . In other words, you will not find many of them together in a Noun Phrase . I think the maximum number of determiners you can squeeze into a Noun Phrase is three or four . Try, if you can, to squeeze more into a single Noun Phrase!



Thank you for visiting!