Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

748 Syntax of Dutch: nouns and noun phrases
contains the unaccusative verb lopen and involves a theme that surfaces as a subject
of the clause. Examples like (202a&b) resemble the productive patterns that can be
found in the eastern and western dialects of Dutch and in German.
(202) a. Hij kust haar de hand.
he kisses her the hand
‘He kisses her hand.’
b. Het hoofd loopt me om.
the head runs me around
‘My head is spinning.’
5.1.5. The negative article geen ‘no’
This section will discuss the negative element geen ‘no’. Although this element is
part of a noun phrase, it normally takes clausal °scope in the sense that it expresses
sentential negation and can therefore often be seen as a stand-in for the combination
of the negative adverb niet and the indefinite article een. A pair of examples
illustrating the alternation between niet een and geen is given in (203).
(203) a. Ik koop natuurlijk geen auto met het stuur aan de rechterkant.
I buy of course no car with the steering wheel on the right.side
‘Of course I don’t buy a car that has the steering wheel on the right-hand side.’
b. Ik koop natuurlijk niet een auto met het stuur aan de rechterkant.
I buy of course not a car with the steering wheel on the right.side
‘Of course I don’t buy a car that has the steering wheel on the right-hand side.’
The alternation in (203) has given rise to the idea that geen is the result of a fusion
of the negative adverb and the indefinite article; cf. Haeseryn et al. (1997: §29.4).
However, such alternations are possible only in a very small subset of the contexts
in which geen and niet een are usable. Not all occurrences of geen can be replaced
by niet een; Table 1 in the introduction to this section on articles has shown that
geen can occur with a larger variety of noun phrases than the indefinite article een,
such as plural and non-count nouns; cf. also Section 5.1.5.2, sub I. Furthermore, we
will see there are also several syntactic constructions in which replacing the
combination of niet een with geen fails. It seems therefore difficult to maintain that
geen is the result of fusion of the negative adverb niet and the indefinite article een.
Actually, it is by no means clear that geen is a determiner: we have suggested in
several places that een should perhaps be analyzed as a numeral, and for geen there
is even more evidence to support such an assumption. For example, geen can be
used in constructions like (204a) with °quantitative er, in which respect it differs
from all determiners but resembles the numerals and the °weak quantifiers. The
same thing holds for the partitive construction in (204b): in this construction geen
can be replaced by a numeral and certain quantifiers but not by a determiner.
Finally, the (c)-examples show that geen can be modified by adverbial phrases like
vrijwel/bijna, an option it shares with some numerals and quantifiers, but which is
never available for determiners. Given these data, it might be fully justified to
consider geen not an article but a numeral or a quantifier. Despite this, we will
discuss geen here and not in Chapter 6, using the notion of negative article instead
of quantifier.