The word ‘all’ can have different meanings depending on the context. It can mean the whole, the total, the complete, or every one of something or someone. For example, “all the cake” means the whole cake, “all the way” means the total distance, “all year” means the complete year, and “all students” means every student.
In English grammar, a determiner is a word that comes before a noun to tell us more about it. There are four main types of determiners: articles (the, a, an), possessives (ours, yours, hers, his, mine, theirs), demonstratives (that, this, there, these, those), and quantifiers (all, many, few).
A predeterminer is a type of determiner that comes before central determiners (articles and possessives) and post-determiners (quantifiers). The only three predeterminers in English are all, both, and half.
For example, in the phrase “all the children”, the word “all” is a predeterminer. It comes before the central determiner “the” and tells us that we are referring to all of the children.
Here are some other examples of predeterminers:
- Both the boys and the girls went to the park.
- Half of the cake was eaten.
- Once a week, I go to the movies.
‘All‘ is a predeterminer which means that it comes before central and post-determiners if there are any. For example: ‘all the people’.
In this post, we look at “all” in a short noun phrase.
1 ALL DAY 276848
2 ALL THINGS 219082 C1 idiom?
All things considered, I feel pretty good.
3 ALL KINDS 209290
4 ALL TIMES 197318
5 ALL TIME 172723
6 ALL SORTS 171175
7 ALL AGES 156459
8 ALL STUDENTS 134044
9 ALL ASPECTS 130978
10 ALL TYPES 115226
11 ALL YEAR 103815
12 ALL LEVELS 101574
13 ALL NIGHT 77384
14 ALL PEOPLE 73618
15 ALL AREAS 63576
16 ALL MEMBERS 58669
17 ALL CASES 51153
18 ALL MEN 46978
19 ALL PARTS 45869
20 ALL INFORMATION 43925
The Claws 7 tagset uses:
| DB | before determiner or pre-determiner capable of pronominal function (all, half) |
| DB2 | plural before-determiner ( both) |