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"Those other people": Adjectives vs. determinatives

English Language & Usage Asked on February 2, 2021

Given the following sentence:

Don’t listen to those other people.

Are those and other adjectives or determinatives? Both? Which makes more sense?

Context:

I am prefixing the words in some phrases with abbreviations. Some of the words are giving me trouble in classification. (The message is supposed to be an implicit proof of why adding prefixes to table names in a database is terrible. But I’d like to get it right.)

Here’s the full set of sentences for your amusement. However, please restrict your comments to the stated question, for the most part.

  1. com-Don’t ver-Listen prep-To adj-Those adj-Other nou-People.
  2. pro-You aux-Should adv-Always ver-Use nou-Prefixes prep-With pro-Your adj-Table nou-Names.
  3. pro-I aux-Have adv-Even ver-Started ver-Using pro-Them prep-In adj-Normal nou-Writing.

  4. com-See adv-How adj-Effective pr-It ver-Is?

  5. nou-People aux-Can ver-Understand pro-Your nou-Writing adv-Better!

(where com means command verb)

This question is part of 3 related questions:

  1. This question
  2. Nouns vs. nouns used as adjectives
  3. Verbs vs. gerunds vs. something else

It originally came from this closed question

2 Answers

I actually think that "those"and "other" are adjectives qualifying "people" unlike determinants such as "a", "an", and "the". Merriam-Webster. Thank you.

Answered by FKS on February 2, 2021

Since you're in charge of the tag set, you can call them anything you want. If you want to say (as some do) that determiners can be classed under 'adjective', then so be it. If not, then so be that.
It's just tagger output, after all, and it doesn't mean anything without a matching parser, which is likely to be just as eccentric in its terminology, depending on which constructions it's set to notice.

Grammatical terminology all depends on who is using it and what they want to use it for. There is no ISO standard for Parts Of Speech. Though the phrase "ISO POS" is enchantingly bizarre.

Answered by John Lawler on February 2, 2021

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