 Normally when we think about determiners we think about them as being fixed unary linguistic objects that have dedicated semantic roles, but is this so? Take the property of being a referring expression, for example. We have spoken about whether descriptions are referring expressions or not, but perhaps it is incorrect to suppose that there are dedicated referring expressions in natural language. Ahn (2019) argues that what is called on to refer can vary greatly in natural language, and that what expressions are deployed in order to refer depends on what else is available to do the job. She proposes a “competition mechanism” which determines which expression might be deployed in order to refer to something.  In some cases it might be a name, in some a demonstrative, in some a pronoun, and in some a description.  It depends on which expression wins the competition in that setting. What this means, if correct, is that the job of reference would not be associated with a single type of syntactic object, but with a large array of syntactic objects. In a similar vein, Ludlow and Živanovic (2022) have suggested that what counts as quantificational may not be a property of individual morphological items, but is more likely a global structural property.  In this instance, the definite and indefinite determiners play more of a role as structure builders and not as individual operators. The kind of quantificational structure that emerges would be a function of the surrounding syntactic objects.