Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

Pre-determiners 967
II. Restrictions on accompanying determiners and quantificational elements
This subsection investigates the restrictions that alle ‘all’ and beide ‘both’ pose on
the presence of co-occurring determiners and quantificational elements. As in the
case of bare al and the pre-determiner alle + Num, the syntax of the constituents
modified by alle and beide largely mirrors that of the same constituents lacking
these quantifiers. We will see later in this section that this fact provides a nice
testing ground for the “fusion” approach, according to which alle is a contracted
form of al and a definite determiner; cf. the discussion of example (71).
A. Determiners
In the present-day vernacular, simplex alle cannot be combined with the definite
article de or the demonstratives die/deze ‘those/these’ (although the sequence alle
de/die/deze can still be found in archaic and very formal language). Beide differs
from alle in that it can be used to the right, though not to the left, of these
determiners. Note that the fact that beide is not in complementary distribution with
the definite article indicates that beide cannot be treated as the result of “fusion” of
the morpheme bei, also found in the pre-determiner allebei (see Section 7.1.2.2),
and the definite article.
(64) a. *alle/beide de/die/deze mannen
all/both the/those/these men
b. de/die/deze beide/*alle mannen
the/those/these both/all men
There is no way of salvaging the ungrammatical examples in (64a) with the aid of
contrastive accent; the bad cases are bad, no matter what context they are inserted
into. On the other hand, the contrastive example in (65a), a contextualized variant of
grammatical (64b) with beide, is somewhat awkward but structurally well-formed.
Backward Conjunction Reduction is marginally possible in (65b) when applied to
beide mannen, but highly awkward when applied to mannen alone. NP-ellipsis in
the second conjunct strengthens this distinction; (65c) show that it is fine with beide
mannen elided but unacceptable with just mannen undergoing ellipsis.
(65) a. ? Ik ken wel déze beide mannen, maar niet dié beide mannen.
b. Ik ken wel déze ? ( ?? beide) ∅, maar niet dié beide mannen. [RNR]
c. Ik ken wel déze beide mannen, maar niet dié (*beide) ∅. [NP-ellipsis]
I know AFF these both men but not those both [men]
Alle does not occur in noun phrases that contain a possessive pronoun. Beide,
on the other hand, is again possible if it appears to the right of the possessor, as is
shown by (66b). The acceptability of these examples is unaffected by the
complexity of the possessor; all variants of (66b) with beide in the right-hand slot
are perfect, while all their counterparts with alle are unacceptable.
(66) a. *alle/beide mijn/mijn vaders/mijn vader z’n auto’s
all/both my/my father’s/my father his cars
b. mijn/mijn vaders/mijn vader z’n beide/*alle auto’s
my/my father’s/my father his both/all cars