Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

(104) a. Iedereen ging naar de vergaderzaal.
everyone went to the meeting.hall
b. Alles is uitverkocht.
everything is sold.out
Numerals and quantifiers 905
The quantifier alle(n) in (105) may perform the same role as the quantifiers
iedereen/alles in (104): if the context provides sufficient information about the
intended referent set, it is possible to use alle(n) as a pronominal quantifier instead
of the full quantified noun phrases alle studenten/boeken ‘all students/books’.
(105) a. Alle studenten/Allen gingen naar de vergaderzaal.
all students/all went to the meeting.hall
b. Alle boeken/Alle zijn uitverkocht.
all books/all are sold.out
It is also possible to use the modifiers ieder and elk as arguments, although this
is considered very formal. The independent use of these quantifiers seems more or
less restricted to contexts in which they are modified by means of a postnominal
van-PP where the complement of van is a plural pronoun/noun phrase. In examples
like (106), there is a strong tendency to use ieder for [+HUMAN] referents; the
tendency to restrict the use of elk to [-HUMAN] entities seems somewhat weaker.
(106) a. Ieder/ ? Elk van ons weet dat de voorzitter geroyeerd is.
each of us knows that the chairman expelled is
‘Each of us knows that the chairman is expelled.’
b. Elk/ *? Ieder van die boeken is een fortuin waard.
each of those books is a fortune worth
‘Each of those books is worth a fortune.’
There are, however, some idiomatic examples in which ieder is used independently
without a modifier being present as in, e.g., ieder zijn deel ‘everyone will get his
share’. Furthermore, ieder can be used independently without a modifier when it
heads an indefinite noun phrase introduced by the article een; this seems impossible
with elk (although some incidental cases can be found on the internet).
(107) Een ieder/ *? elk weet dat de voorzitter geroyeerd is.
an each knows that the chairman expelled is
‘Everyone knows that the chairman is expelled.’
6.2.2.3. Use as floating quantifier
Floating quantifiers are quantifiers which are associated to noun phrases occurring
elsewhere in the sentence, but with which they do not form a syntactic constituent.
This use, which is restricted to universal quantifiers, is illustrated in (108). In this
case, too, the difference between ieder/elk and allen seems to be that the former
have a distributive reading, whereas the latter has a more collective flavor: it is,
however, harder to demonstrate the difference here since it is not the case that
(108b) can be used to express that the students received one hundred euros as a
group.