Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

946 Syntax of Dutch: nouns and noun phrases
That al ‘all’ is a universal quantifier is of course also clear from its meaning: in
terms of Figure 1 from Section 1.1.2.2.1, it indicates that all members in denotation
set A of the noun phrase are properly included in denotation set B of the verb
phrase, that is, that A - (A ∩ B) = ∅; cf. the discussion in Section 6.2.1.
A B
A ∩ B
Figure 1: Set-theoretic representation of the subject-predicate relation
The semantics of heel, which will be discussed more extensively in Section 7.2.1, is
somewhat different; as was already mentioned, the noun phrase in (3b) refers to the
parts that make up the house in question, and the pre-determiner heel indicates that
the predicate schoonmaken applies to all parts of this house. Now if we take set A in
Figure 1 to refer to the relevant parts of the house, it will be clear that heel also
expresses that A - (A ∩ B) = ∅.
Related to the fact that al and heel quantify over a different kind of set is that
the two pre-determiners are generally in complementary distribution, which we will
illustrate here for count nouns: since the pre-determiner al quantifies over a set of
entities with a cardinality higher than one, the head noun of the noun phrase it
quantifies is normally plural; since the pre-determiner heel quantifies over the parts
of some entity, the head noun of the noun phrase it modifies is typically singular.
(4) a. Jan heeft al de koeken/*koek opgegeten.
Jan has all the cookies/cookie prt.-eaten
b. Jan heeft heel de taart/*taarten opgegeten.
Jan has whole the cake/cakes prt.-eaten
With the brief discussion above, we have set the stage for the more exhaustive
discussion of al and heel in, respectively, Section 7.1 and Section 7.2. We will
conclude in Section 7.3 with a brief note on focus particles, which may also occur in
pre-determiner position.
7.1. The universal quantifier al ‘all’ and its alternants
This section is mainly concerned with the syntax and semantics of the universal
quantifier al ‘all’ and its alternant alle in (5): we will refer to the former as PRE-
DETERMINER BARE AL because it always precedes a definite determiner and never
has the “inflectional” schwa ending; the latter will be called INFLECTED ALLE.