Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

(125) a. Het schip verging met man en muis.
the ship was.wrecked with man and mouse
‘The ship was lost with everyone on it.’
b. Hij verzette zich met man en macht.
he resisted REFL with man and power
‘He resisted with all his might.’
c. Hij ging van deur tot deur.
he went from door to door
‘He went to all places.’
Determiners: articles and pronouns 723
Again the disjunctive coordinator of ‘or’is normally not found, although it must be
noted that the fixed collocation op leven en dood in, e.g., op leven en dood vechten
‘to fight a life-and-death battle’ is sometimes realized with of; a Googel search
performed on August 25, 2009, resulted in 674 hits for the string [op leven of dood]
(but more than 50.000 hits for [op leven en dood]).
Finally, note that none of the examples above involve conjuncts containing a
modifier. This is not accidental: adding a modifier to any of the bare nouns above
will give rise to an ungrammatical result.
IV. Conclusion
The previous subsections have shown that bare singular count noun may
occasionally occur in argument position, but that this always triggers some special
meaning aspect; see De Swart & Zwarts (2001) for more discussion. We therefore
conclude that we are normally dealing with more or less idiomatic constructions;
see Zwarts (2008) for a potential counterexample to this claim.
5.1.3. Definite articles with acronyms and abbreviations
Definite articles are not normally construed with proper nouns, unless they are part
of the name as such (cf. Section 5.1.2.1, (83)), which especially holds for names of
companies and organizations. Some examples of this sort are given in (126). The
difference between (126c) and (126d) serves the purpose of showing that the
presence of the definite article is largely idiosyncratic. In many cases, proper nouns
of this sort have acronyms. The primed examples show that the definite article is
generally retained when an acronym is used instead of the full name. Example
(126d′) further shows that the acronyms of names that do not contain an article also
lack an article.
(126) a. de Nederlandse Spoorwegen a′. de NS
the Dutch Railways
b. de Verenigde Staten (van Amerika) b′. de VS
the United States of America
c. de Centrumdemocraten c′. de CD
the Center Democrats (political party)
d. ( ? de) Democraten ’66 d′. (*de) D66
Democrats ’66 (political party)