Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

Pre-determiners 1007
many cases). As a consequence, some of the semantic anomalies that we found with
bare heel dissolve when pre-determiner bare heel is replaced by post-determiner
inflectible heel. We illustrate this in the examples below, referring the reader back
to the more detailed discussion in Section 7.2.1.
Consider the examples in (187). What (187a) means is that the entire house has
been cleaned from top to bottom, not necessarily that all the individual rooms of the
house have been cleaned. As a reflex of this, the cleaning in (187a) need not be
directed towards the interior of the house but can also involve the exterior of the
house, which would be distinctly odd in the case of Heel het huis is schoongemaakt
‘All the house has been cleaned’ in (169). Similarly, the noun phrases in (187b&c)
simply refer to the entire motorboat/house, and, as a result, these examples are
perfectly acceptable in contrast to those in (170), where reference is made to all the
relevant subparts of the motorboat/house.
(187) a. Het hele huis is schoongemaakt.
the whole house is clean.made
b. De hele motorboot gaat heen en weer.
the whole motorboat goes to and fro (≈ is rocking)
c. Het hele huis is bedolven onder de modder.
the whole house is buried under the mud
The examples in (167) in Section 7.2.1 have shown that pre-determiner heel, as a
consequence of the unit feature of its semantics, bars the noun phrases which it
quantifies from occurring in distributive contexts. Post-determiner heel does not
turn out to be sensitive to this distributivity effect: the examples in (188) are
perfectly acceptable due to the fact that heel simply expresses that the predicate
affects the referent of the noun phrase in its entirety.
(188) a. Ik heb de hele film mijn volle aandacht gegeven.
I have the whole movie my full attention given
‘I gave the entire movie my full attention.’
b. Ik heb aandachtig naar de hele film zitten kijken.
I have attentively to the whole movie sit look
‘I watched the entire movie attentively.’
The examples in (171) have shown that modifiers expressing an exception give
rise to a marked result in noun phrases featuring pre-determiner bare heel. Again,
we find that post-determiner heel behaves differently: the sentences in (189a&b) are
perfectly acceptable with the “except”-clause present. This will be clear from the
fact that a Google search on the strings [heel de serie behalve] and [de hele serie
behalve] performed in July 2008 resulted in, respectively, 1 and 18 hits.
(189) a. Het hele kantoorgebouw (behalve de begane grond) is verhuurd.
the whole office block except the ground floor is rented.out
b. De hele Veiligheidsraad (behalve China) stemde voor de resolutie.
the whole Security Council except China voted for the resolution
c. Ik heb de hele serie (behalve deel 28).
I have the whole series except volume 28