Determining Determiner Sequencing: A Syntactic Analysis for English

Abstract

Previous work on English determiners has primarily concentrated on their semantics or scoping properties rather than their complex ordering behavior. The little work that has been done on determiner ordering generally splits determiners into three subcategories. However, this small number of categories does not capture the finer distinctions necessary to correctly order determiners. This paper presents a syntactic account of determiner sequencing based on eight independently identified semantic features. Complex determiners, such as genitives, partitives, and determiner modifying adverbials, are also presented. This work has been implemented as part of XTAG, a wide-coverage grammar for English based in the Feature-Based, Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (FB-LTAG) formalism.