1085: Determiners are not Adjectives Nov 28, 2017

For a long period of time, articles ('the', 'a', or 'an') were considered to be a type of adjective rather than a type of determiner. Though they do act differently in some ways, they do—at least at first glance—seem to modify nouns and though they have to go before adjectives, there is already an order to adjectives anyway. The difference is not only in the way it operates syntactically, but also differences semantically. Determiners create a reference to the noun, rather than a modification thereto, so saying 'a dog' doesn't change the quality of the dog. Genitives like "Mike's" is also a determiner, for the same reason, but also a noun cannot take two determiners, so there can be "the dog" or "Mike's dog" but not Mike's the dog".