Determiners as functional elements of sentence structure

Almost six years ago a Russian member of Jose Carillo’s “English Forum" posed a very interesting question about a little discussed functional element of English sentence structure — the determiners, which as we know are any of those words that are normally positioned right before a noun phrase to indicate whether that noun phrase is being used in a specific or general sense.

A determiner is specific when the speaker or writer believes that the listener or reader knows exactly who or what is being referred to, as the article “the” in “the woman who won the top award for food condiment startups.” On the other hand, a determiner is general when the speaker or writer is not talking about things in particular and the listener or reader doesn’t know exactly who or what is being referred to, as the adjective “any” in “any journalist worthy of trust and respect is knowledgeable and cognizant of a country’s libel laws.”