One of the major problems presented by this category is that the Romance tradition makes use of the label Pronominal Adjective, whereas other languages (e.g. English) use Determiner.
The two classes are not mappable one to the other. This is a crucial problem, involving the different behaviour of the Determiners and Pronominal Adjectives.
The choice of calling e.g. `some' and `all' respectively Determiner and Predeterminer in English (both Indefinite Pronominal Adjectives in the Italian tradition) rests on their particular distribution in context: ``some children'',``all the children'', and this can also work in Italian: ``alcuni ragazzi'', ``tutti i ragazzi''. However, if calling possessives Determiners in English works for their complementary distribution with respect to the article (``my book'', ``the book''), this is not the case in Italian, because ``il libro'' does not have a corresponding expression *``mio libro''.
(As far as Italian possessives are concerned, a complementary distribution with article is found only with a closed number of family nouns: ``mio/il padre'', ``mia/la madre'', ``mio/il fratello'', ``mia/la sorella'').
The particular behaviour of possessives perhaps influenced the GENELEX choice to opt for a separate Determiner category, as well as the Adjective (where Pronominal Adjectives are also included) and Pronoun categories. The situation in the GENELEX model is as follows:
``le nôtre'' PRON
``nôtre chien'' DET
``le chien est nôtre'' ADJ
This implies the presence of values that are typical for Pronominal Adjective in the table of the Adjective category, among the values of the feature Type.
In the NERC scheme, the problem of the use of different tags, i.e. Determiner and Pronominal Adjective, in different traditions has been raised and the proposal made to opt for the label Determiner, without any further functional distinction.
The TEI work-group on annotation (TEI, 1991) has made the choice of inserting Determiners in the Adjective category, with the value pronominal.