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I was studying articles when I came across the following statement:

There are other special modifiers called determiners or markers that may appear in front of a noun phrase. Do not use an article if you also intend to use any of the following markers directly before the noun: this, that, these, those, my, his, her, your, our, their, its, any, either, each, every, many, few, several, some, all. (http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/english-as-a-second-language/articles)

However, I'm not sure about "all" because I came across phrases that included articles between "all" and the nouns. For example - "all the countries", "all the way", etc...

I would appreciate if anyone can clarify what the blockquote means and explain if there are exceptions.

Thanks

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  • Yes, that is a good grammar question. :) -- Though, notice that in your examples, the article "the" is occurring right in front of the noun. (That is, one of their "determiners"/marker is not right in front of the noun, but rather, they are in front of the "article".)
    – F.E.
    Commented Apr 22, 2014 at 0:33
  • In your examples of "all the countries", "all the way", the word "all" could be considered to be functioning as a predeterminer modifier (i.e. predeterminer). -- maybe there's something in wikipedia or on internet that's usable. Or maybe someone will create an answer that explains that structure grammatically. (Unfortunately, I've gotta go and do, er, some work or something.)
    – F.E.
    Commented Apr 22, 2014 at 0:38
  • Articles are determiners. Articles are used when there must be a determiner and there isn't already one. Basically, articles and other determiners can't be used together (except for idioms, which feature large in article usage). Commented Apr 22, 2014 at 1:17

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I have always thought that "all the X" was an elision of "all of the X". Certainly, all of the other words that function like all (e.g. "some", "none", "many") require "of".

Luckily, I have zero proof of this.

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