Status of ‘determiner’ as a grammatical category

Ascertain whether the grammatical category ‘determiner’ should be eliminated as an independent category in favor of analyzing these items within other parts of speech (e.g., nouns or adjectives) under the morphology-driven marking framework.

Background

The paper questions the traditional determiner category, noting that items often labeled determiners can share morphosyntactic properties with adjectives and nouns (e.g., agreement in number and gender, occurrence with definite markers). Cross-linguistic evidence (e.g., co-occurrence patterns in Somali and Greek) challenges a uniform DP-based analysis.

Given these observations, the author contemplates a strong position that would reject determiners as a distinct category, but adopts a provisional moderate stance. The issue is explicitly left open pending further investigation.