Year 5 homework help - adjective or determiner

[SirSidneyRuffDiamond]

DS has some homework in which he has to decide if a particular word in a sentence is a verb, noun, adverb, adjective, pronoun or determiner. There is room for only one written answer. In the sentence:

The recipe for beef pie calls for fourteen onions.

Is fourteen an adjective or a determiner? He (and I) thought it was both, but he is concerned that there is no space to write this. FYI he hates breaking rules, so writing outside the given box would annoy him.

AllPizzas, your explanation is spot on! Thanks.

" He's settled on determiner (quantifier was not on the list)" quantifies are a particular type of determiner
quantifier (e.g. all, both, some)
article(a/an, the)
demonstrative(this, that, these, those)
possessive (e.g. my, her, our, Anna’s)
number (e.g. one, three, 14h

I think the confusion happens because they teach numbers are adjectives in ks1. But AllPizza's explanation makes it clear, that numbers doesn't actually describe noun. I remember ds making alliteration sentences using adjectives, and a lot of them included numbers. Or is this old NC?
Determiners and simple adjectives are totally different and easy to distinguish. I wish they taught ds "determiner" separate from the start, if they need to learn it anyway in ks2.

If it's being taught in your KS1 they are wrong Irvine

I don't know about now, but when my ds was in ks1 during old NC, numbers were definitely taught as adjectives.

Perhaps I should ask my mother who was educated in the early 1950s and no doubt does know what one is

My mother has been helping my DC with spag homework as it comes out on the day she has them. She went to a v academic girls grammar in the early 50s with a big focus on parsing sentences etc. She says she has never heard of some of the things that DC3 is having to learn! If that is the case, it's hardly that we're going back to the good old halcyon days of 1950s grammar teaching if our current syllabus is teaching things that they didn't need to/have to know then?!

No GU. I was at a grammar school in the early 50s, and hadn't heard of a determiner until I read this thread.

I do think that much of it is a matter of semantics and, that being the case, what profit is there in drilling it into 10 year olds? But then I live in a high pressure 11+ area so should be used to dealing with this level of pedantry.

Anyway I have done a bit more reading now and it would seem that determiners are a subcategory of adjectives and that cardinals are often categorised more specifically as determiners. But my feeling is that ordinals are often used adjectivally?

To confuse me even further I also came across an argument that determiners are more accurately pronominal adjectives.

At this point my brain just shouted,"NO!" And shut down. I am part way through an MA in English (Lit, not Lang) and so far I have never needed to discuss grammar to this extent. Thank heavens

I think the key is just listen to the teachers at school. Don't over complicate things for kids. They will be tested on what they teach at school. What woman12345 say is good example of that.
If they teach the kids it's determiner, that's what they need to know, isn't it?

And I don't know about "woman", but all the people commented it as determiner on this thread, I recognise as/or they say they are a primary teacher. I would just trust them .

Determiners and adjectives are related as they both modify the noun but they aren't the same

Determiners are words that make the noun more specific (in the olden days when I was at school we talked about definite and indefinite articles etc)