The class of the Italian pronominal adjectives is dealt with
in the Determiner section.
They represent a ``closed" class, i.e. given a language, the determiners can be always enumerated.
Properties shared by the members of this category can be
grouped under the following criteria.
Morphological criterion:
- determiners share with the noun and adjective the agreement
in gender, questo, questa,
and number, questo, questi. The possessive are characterized
by the Person feature.
Syntactic peculiarities can be isolated that can be of help to
distinguish pronouns from pronominal adjectives (see below, under
possessive type).
Semantic criteria:
- the members of this class express a deictic function:
* the ``belonging" of a given object - possessives, il mio
libro;
* the collocation in the space of a given object -
demonstratives, questo libro;
* the undeterminate quantity - indefinites, alcuni libri;
* a determination - interrogatives, quali libri?;
* an exclamation - exclamatives, che libri!;
* the relatives i cui libri.