Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

998 Syntax of Dutch: nouns and noun phrases
(162) a. *geheel de taart
b. de gehele taart
For completeness’ sake, note that heel can also be used in other syntactic functions,
for instance, as an °amplifier of an adjective, as in een heel/hele lekkere taart ‘a
very tasty cake’, where heel is optionally adorned with the inflectional schwa
typical of adjectival attributive modifiers. Examples like these will not be discussed
here; see Section A3.1.2 for discussion of this use.
In (161), we glossed pre-determiner bare heel as “all” in order to distinguish it
from post-determiner heel and to give recognition to the fact that there are syntactic
and interpretative parallels between pre-determiner bare heel and pre-determiner
bare al. Post-determiner inflectible heel will be systematically glossed as “whole”
even where this gloss is semantically inappropriate, that is, both on its adjectival
and its quantificational reading; when necessary, English prose translations will be
provided to bring out the semantics of heel in the constructions under discussion.
Section 7.2.1 will start by addressing the semantics of heel, with the two
syntactic patterns in (161) being discussed in separate sections. Section 7.2.2 will
discuss the syntactic distribution of heel and its alternants within the noun phrase,
and Section 7.2.3 the distribution of noun phrases modified by heel as a whole.
Section 7.2.4 will conclude with a discussion of the independent uses of heel.
7.2.1. Semantics of heel ‘all/whole’
This section discusses the semantics of heel. Section 7.2.1.1 will start by discussing
pre-determiner bare heel. This is followed in Section 7.2.1.2 by a discussion of
post-determiner inflectible heel, for which a further distinction must be made
between the quantificational and the purely adjectival uses of heel. Since purely
adjectival heel “whole/intact” behaves like a common attributive adjective, the
focus will be on the quantificational type.
7.2.1.1. Pre-determiner bare heel
This section discusses the meaning of pre-determiner bare heel. In Subsection I, we
start with its core semantics, which is quantificational in nature. Subsection II will
show, however, that pre-determiner heel can also be used to express condescension
in clauses that contain implicit or explicit negation.
I. Core semantics: exhaustive partitioning of structured units
The core semantics of noun phrases with pre-determiner bare heel is quantificational
in nature and can best be captured under the rubric of exhaustive partitioning
of structured units; cf. Zwarts (1992: Ch. 7). What we mean by this is that heel
gives an instruction to the addressee to partition the unit denoted by the head noun
into all of its relevant subparts, and to select the sum total of these subparts as the
reference of the noun phrase. The semantic characterization of heel just given can
be decomposed into three elementary building blocks: it involves (i) a structured
unit, (ii) a partitioning, and (iii) exhaustivity. Each of these aspects will be
addressed below.