Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

(252) a. dat ik geen/ ? niet piano kan spelen.
that I no/not piano can play
‘that I cannot play the piano’
b. dat ik geen/ ? niet auto kan rijden.
that I no/not car can drive
‘that I cannot drive a car.’
Determiners: articles and pronouns 765
This suggestion is further supported by the fact that when the noun is also part of
the verb cluster, as in (253), it is niet that must be used. Note that in these examples
there is again a tendency to spell the collocations as single words.
(253) a. dat ik niet kan pianospelen. a′. *dat ik kan geen piano spelen.
that I not can piano.play that I can no piano play
‘that I cannot play the piano’
b. dat ik niet kan autorijden. b′. *dat ik kan geen auto rijden.
that I not can car.drive that I can no car drive
‘that I cannot drive a car.’
Section 5.1.2.3, sub I, has shown that topicalization of the main verb cannot strand
the noun but must pied pipe it. The examples in (254) show that topicalization of
the N+V collocation is excluded with geen and strands the negative adverb niet in
its original position. This suggests that the examples in (254) are related to those in
(253a&b), in which the N+V collocation behave like a single word, rather than to
those in (252) where they are clearly construed independently and the nouns form a
constituent with the negative article geen.
(254) a. Pianospelen kan ik niet. a′. *Geen piano spelen kan ik.
piano.play can I not
b. Autorijden kan ik niet. b′. *Geen auto rijden kan ik.
car.drive can I not
This fact that geen forms a syntactic constituent with the nouns piano/auto again
suggests that geen cannot be the result of fusion of niet and een: nouns like
piano/auto never feature an indefinite article in N+V collocations, nor are they
likely to have a null determiner; they are truly bare nouns, which nonetheless can
still be combined with geen.
II. Geen and personal pronouns and proper nouns
It is impossible for geen to combine directly with personal pronouns; in (255), we
have illustrated this for the plural pronouns. An exception must be made, however,
for the doubly-primed examples in which geen is followed by a case-inflected form
of the pronoun. These forms are relics from older stages of the language and belong
to the formal register; in present-day Dutch the partitive constructions in the singlyprimed
examples would be used.