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!
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment