Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

808 Syntax of Dutch: nouns and noun phrases
knurven ‘to knurf’, the first interpretation that will come to mind for a sentence like
Jan en Marie knurven elkaar ‘Jan and Marie are knurving each other’ is that it
implies that both “Jan is KNURVing Marie” and “Marie is KNURVing Jan” are true;
similarly a sentence like De jongens knurven elkaar ‘The boys are knurving each
other’ will be taken to imply that each of the boys is knurving the others.
Nevertheless it seems that the notion of “reciprocity” may be absent when we
are dealing with asymmetric predicates. Examples of such asymmetric predicates
can be found in clauses containing locational or temporal phrases like to sit in front
of: if Jan is sitting in front of Marie, it immediately follows that Marie does not sit
in front of Jan. The examples in (378) show that elkaar can nevertheless be used
with such predicates.
(378) • Non-reciprocal interpretation of elkaar
a. Jan en Marie zitten achter elkaar.
Jan and Marie sit behind each.other
b. De jongens gingen na elkaar weg.
the boys went after each.other away
‘The boys left one after the other.’
c. Ik stapel de dozen op elkaar.
I pile the boxes on each.other
‘I am piling the boxes, one on top of the other.’
The examples in (379) show that constructions like these do not always yield an
acceptable result. Possibly, the difference in acceptability between (378) and (379)
is due to the fact that in (379) the intended relation can simply be expressed by
means of the symmetric preposition naast ‘next-to’, whereas Dutch lacks symmetric
prepositions that could express the intended relations in (378). To our knowledge,
differences like these have never been systematically investigated.
(379) a. *Jan en Marie zitten links van elkaar.
Jan and Marie sit to.the.left of each.other
‘Jan and Marie are sitting to the left of each other.’
b. ?? Ik leg de dozen rechts van elkaar.
I put the boxes to.the.right of each.other
‘I put the boxes to the right of each other.’
III. Binding
A satisfactory discussion of reflexive, reciprocal, and referential personal pronouns
implies that some attention must be paid to the syntactic constraints on their
interpretation: it is not the case that they can be coreferential with just any noun
phrase in the sentence. These syntactic restrictions on what has become known as
BINDING have been in the center of much generative research of the last forty years,
and it seems impossible to do full justice to this research within the confines of this
study on nouns and their projections. Nevertheless, although we plan to discuss this
topic more extensively elsewhere, we still want to highlight some of the results of
this research here; see Broekhuis (1994) for a preliminary version of the more
exhaustive discussion of this issue.