Segun Ige
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Sometime ago, I was listening to one of TVC presenters. Not surprisingly, the presenter asked the interviewee: “*Can you tell us some certain things”? To be sure, this ungrammatical collocation is commoner in Nigerians’ everyday conversations. Its variant, “*some few things”, is relatively heard. In English, the permutation of one determiner with another is rather rule-constrained. Could you tell the determiners in question? Yes, they are “some” and “few”.
Let us begin by saying determiners are a small group class of words that qualify nouns, just like adjectives. Clearly, this class of words determiners whether a noun is definite, indefinite, near-reference, and so on. For example, “the man in the garden is my father” is componentially made up of five phrases, which are “the man”, “the garden”, “the man in the garden”,“my father”and “in the garden”, with the first four being noun phrases and the last a prepositional phrase.To be specific, “the man”, “the garden” and “my father”are each consisted of a certain determiner and a noun. While“man” and “garden” are premodified by the definite article ‘the’, “father” itself is premodified by the possessive (pronoun)‘my’. Each of these premodifying elements is a typical determiner.
Again, some classes of determiners do co-occur quite freely. Consider the following possibilities of co-occurrence of a few determiners, according to Oluikpe (1978:28):
‘the’ ‘two’ boys (article + numeral)
‘those’ ‘two’ boys (demonstrative + numeral)
‘our’ ‘second’ choice (possessive + numeral)
‘a’ ‘few’ things (article + quantifier)
‘those’ ‘few’ things (demonstrative + quantifier)
‘your’ ‘few’ belongings (possessive + quantifier)
(Quotations mine)
Logically, some Nigerians would arrive at the faulty conclusion that: “Well, if we can have “those two boys”, “those few things” and “your few belongings” co-occurring, then there’s nothing wrong in saying “*some certain things” and “*some few things”. Actually, “some”, “certain” and “few” are from the ‘same class of quantifier’ and cannot therefore co-occur as do the classes of determiners above. So, this implies that one of members of a class could be used at a time. The right usage would then be: “Some things” or “certain things”, or “some things” or “few things”. Let’s look at how these work in sentences:
1. There are some things you do which I don’t like.
2. I bought certain things at the market.
3. The presenter asked few questions during the interview.
