Grammar: Word classes: Determiners: Referring to specific people, things, etc

Overview

What are specific determiners?: Form and function

We use the term 'specific determiner' to refer to a particular grammatical category or form. Specific determiners have one main function: 

to identify a specific Thing

We can summarise the relationship between the forms (the, this, my, whose) and the functions of specific determiners as follows: 

The following provides a more detailed summary of the relationship between the forms and functions of specific determiners.  

We choose a specific determiner from two systems simultaneously:

Speaker's point of view
	distance: 'near me' (this, these, which) or 'not near me' (that, those, what)
	possession: 'person' and 'number' (my, your, our, his, her, its, their, one's, whose)

Speaker's interaction with other speakers
	making a statement: 'stating' (this, that, these, those, my, your, our, his, her, its, their, one's)
	asking a question: 'asking' (which, what, whose)

By choosing simultaneously from two systems, we arrive at four subsets of specific determiners:

The definite article the (although a demonstrative used for stating 'distance') behaves differently from the other demonstratives (this, that, these, those) and we therefore treat it separately.

The interrogatives which and what treat 'distance' as a choice between 'definite' (eg which colour? - choose one from a set of known colours) and 'indefinite' (eg what colour? - choose any colour, without reference to a set of known colours). 

Note that the term Thing is written with an initial capital letter to remind us that it is a functional term.