Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

580 Syntax of Dutch: nouns and noun phrases
again that the QC can only occur in clause-initial position when N1 has a referential
reading.
The ambiguity described above may only arise when the descriptive content of
N1 is weak: it is hard to determine what the denotation set of nouns like boel ‘a lot’,
aantal ‘number’, kilo ‘kilo’ and liter ‘liter’ is. When the N1 does have a clear
descriptive content, like the collective and container nouns in (14), agreement with
this noun is strongly preferred.
(14) a. Een kudde olifanten gaat/ *? gaan voorbij.
a herd [of] elephants passes/pass prt.
b. Er ligt/*liggen een zakje snoepjes op tafel.
there lies/lie a bag [of] sweets on the.table
Part nouns like reep ‘bar’ in (15) also seem to have descriptive content, and we
therefore expect them to trigger agreement on the verb. This is indeed the case
although we cannot show this solely by appealing to the agreement facts because
part nouns are always used in combination with a substance noun, which triggers
singular agreement on the verb: the fact that the verb in (15a) is singular therefore
does not tell us much. The plural agreement in (15b), of course, conclusively shows
that N1 can act as the syntactic head of the construction, but, since we have seen in
(13a) that the verb must agree with plural N1s, this still does not suffice to exclude
the possibility that N2 may function as the syntactic head in (15a). However, the fact
that the part noun counterpart of (13b), given in (15c), is unacceptable seems
sufficient to conclude that the part nouns must function as the syntactic head of a
QC: if N2 can act as the syntactic head of the construction, this example should be
grammatical.
(15) a. Er ligt een reep chocola op tafel.
there lies a bar [of] chocolate on the.table
‘There is a bar of chocolate on the table.’
b. Er liggen/*ligt twee repen chocola op tafel.
there lie/lies two bars [of] chocolate on the.table
‘There are two bars of chocolate on the table.’
c. *Er ligt/liggen twee reep chocola op tafel.
there lies/lie two bar [of] chocolate on the.table
The examples in (10) to (15) have shown that the number features that trigger
number agreement on the finite verb can be either situated on N2 or on N1. The
actual choice seems related to whether N1 is referential or purely quantificational. A
purely quantificational noun like boel ‘lot’ in (10) apparently does not have the
necessary features to trigger agreement on the verb, whereas referential nouns like
the collective noun kudde ‘herd’ in (14a) or the part noun reep ‘bar’ in (15) do have
these features. Other nouns, like the measure noun liter, seem to have some
intermediate status, and the question whether they trigger agreement on the verb or
not depends on whether they have a purely quantificational or a more referential
function.