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Central semantics of value determiner

The class of the Italian pronominal adjectives is dealt with in the Determiner section.

They represent a ``closed" class, i.e. given a language, the determiners can be always enumerated.

Properties shared by the members of this category can be grouped under the following criteria.

Morphological criterion:

- determiners share with the noun and adjective the agreement in gender, questo, questa, and number, questo, questi. The possessive are characterized by the Person feature.

Syntactic peculiarities can be isolated that can be of help to distinguish pronouns from pronominal adjectives (see below, under possessive type).

Semantic criteria:

- the members of this class express a deictic function:
* the ``belonging" of a given object - possessives, il mio libro;
* the collocation in the space of a given object - demonstratives, questo libro;
* the undeterminate quantity - indefinites, alcuni libri;
* a determination - interrogatives, quali libri?;
* an exclamation - exclamatives, che libri!;
* the relatives i cui libri.

pos=det
D e s c r i p t i o nE x a m p l e s
possessivemio/poss   tuo/poss   suo/poss   nostro/poss  
vostro/poss   loro/poss   proprio/poss  
demonstrativequesto/dem   codesto/dem   quello/dem   quel/dem  
indefinitealcuno/indf   certo/indf   tale/indf  
taluno/indf   quale/indf  
altro/indf   altrui/indf  
qualunque/indf   qualsiasi/indf   tutto/indf  
ciascuno/indf   ogni/indf  
nessuno/indf   poco/indf   alquanto/indf   parecchio/indf  
molto/indf   troppo/indf   tanto/indf   altrettanto/indf  
interrogativeche/int   quale/int   quanto/int  
relativecui/rel   quale/rel   quanto/rel  
exclamativeche/excl   quale/excl   quanto/excl  


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Next: Transcategorization phenomena with other Up: pos-value determiner Previous: pos-value determiner