unlike prototypical nouns, they cannot be made plural and do not head phrases contain determinatives. Bas Aarts notes that this argument does not actually assert any adverb-like properties but rather just a lack of certain properties of nouns, suggesting that words like yesterday and today are nouns, albeit less prototypical than some nouns. Determiners There is typically little confusion between nouns and determiners in English, but certain words, namely you and we, share features of both pronouns and determiners in certain constructions, as in we students know the truth. These words resemble pronouns in that they show case contrast (compare us students), a feature that, in Modern English, is typical of pronouns but not determiners. Because they resemble pronouns in this way, Evelyne Delorme and Ray C. Dougherty treat words like us as pronouns in apposition with the noun phrases that follow them, which is an analysis that Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage also follows. Richard Hudson and Mariangela Spinillo also categorize these words as pronouns but do not assume an appositive relationship between the pronoun and the rest of the noun phrase. However, two other features make these words resemble determiners rather than nouns. First, their phrase-initial position (we students) is typical of determiners (the students). Second, they cannot combine with other determiners (*the we students), which suggests that they fill the same role. These characteristics have led linguists like Ray Jackendoff and Steven Paul Abney to categorize such uses of we and you as determiners. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language similarly classifies this use of we and you as "an extended, secondary use" in which words that began as pronouns have been reanalyzed as determiners. References and notes Notes References English grammar English words