Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

578 Syntax of Dutch: nouns and noun phrases
4.1.1.2. The head of the quantificational binominal construction
It is often not immediately clear whether N1 or N2 constitutes the head of a certain
QC. This section argues that we have to distinguish the three types of QC in (9), and
discusses which types of N1s can enter into which types of QC. Some N1s may
occur in more than one construction type; these N1s are often ambiguous between a
reading as quantifier noun and one of the other types in example (2) above.
(9) • Quantificational binominal constructions
a. Type 1: N2 is both the syntactic and the semantic head of the construction
b. Type 2: N1 is the syntactic and N2 is the semantic head of the construction
c. Type 3: N1 is both the syntactic and the semantic head of the construction
4.1.1.2.1. Determining the syntactic head of the construction
This section provides two agreement tests to determine which N functions as the
syntactic head of the binominal construction. These tests will also reveal that QCs
are sometimes ambiguous in the sense that both N1 and N2 may function as the
syntactic head.
I. Subject-verb (number) agreement
The first test focuses on the fact that the finite verb agrees in number with the
subject of the clause. Given that the two nouns in the QC may differ in number, we
can determine the syntactic head of the construction by looking at the number
specification of the finite verb: the noun that the verb agrees with is the syntactic
head. Example (10) illustrates this for the quantifier noun boel ‘a lot’ and the
collective noun groep ‘group’. In (10a), the number specification on the finite verb
clearly shows that we must consider the plural N2 studenten ‘students’ as the
syntactic head of the construction and not the singular N1 boel. In (10b), on the
other hand, the singular agreement on the verb unambiguously shows that it is the
singular N1 groep that acts as the syntactic head.
(10) a. Er demonstreren/*demonstreert een boel studenten.
there protestpl/protestssg a lot [of] students
‘A lot of students are demonstrating.’
b. Er demonstreert/*demonstreren een groep studenten.
there protestssg/protestpl a group [of] students
‘A group of students is demonstrating.’
Since we have seen in Section 4.1.1.1 that the noun aantal is ambiguous between a
quantifier and a collective reading, it is expected that QCs with this noun will show
mixed behavior with respect to subject-verb agreement. The examples in (11) show
that this expectation is indeed borne out. It must be noted, however, that the two
examples seem to differ in their preferential agreement pattern: a search in the
Corpus Gesproken Nederlands by Van Eerten (2007) has pointed out that in
examples like (11a) the majority of cases (76%) exhibit plural agreement, whereas
in examples like (11b) there is a clear preference for singular agreement (70%).
This may be related to the fact that the QC in (11) is indefinite, and that placement