Basic introduction to parts of speech

Specific questions

Pronouns and determiners

A frequent question we get is "What is the difference between a pronoun and a determiner? You tag 'this' as two parts of speech: demonstrative pronoun and demonstrative determiner. I get the first and the last, but not the other two."

The simplest way to explain this is to give two example sentences,

a) I was talking about this cat.

b) This is the cat I was talking about.

In the first case, the this is modifying the following noun cat. In the second case it is substituting the noun phrase this cat. Where the word this is used as a modifier in Apertium we call it a determiner, and where it is used to substitute a noun phrase we call it a pronoun.

This is not always necessarily relevant for translation, for example in Icelandic it is translated as þessi in both cases. However, it might still be relevant for transfer, for example when the pronoun is a determiner we may want to include it in concordance operations (e.g. for gender, number, and case) with the head noun, but when it is a pronoun we might not.

a) I will give this to the cat

    Ég skal að gefa kettinum þetta.

b) I will give it to this cat

    Ég skal að gefa þessum kettinum það.

In (b) the determiner þessi "this" agrees in gender, number and case with the indirect object köttur "cat", whereas in (a), it the pronoun þessi functions as the direct object and agrees with its antecedent.