Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

(229) a. Wati lees jij [ti voor een boek]?
b. Wati lees jij [ti voor een boeken]?
c. Wati drink jij [ti voor een koffie]?
d. Wati is dat [ti voor iets/iemand]?
Binominal constructions 655
Evidence in favor of this analysis comes from the fact that the split is possible
only in certain syntactic configurations. For example, when the wat voor phrase is
the complement of a preposition, as in (230), the split is impossible because
subextraction from an NP-complement of a preposition is generally excluded. Since
much more can be said about the syntactic restrictions on the wat voor split, we will
postpone further discussion of this to Section 4.2.2.3.
(230) a. [PP Op [NP wat voor een bericht]] wacht je?
for what for a message wait you
‘For what kind of message are you waiting?’
b. *Wati wacht je [PP op [NP ti voor een bericht]]?
II. The semantic head of the construction
The examples in (227) suggest that it is N2 that satisfies the semantic selection
restrictions of the verb; this is further supported by the fact that the noun boek(en)
‘book(s)’ in (227a&b) cannot be replaced by a noun like sigaar, which would
violate these selection restrictions: *Wat voor een sigaar/sigaren lees je? ‘what
kind of cigar(s) are you reading?’. It is therefore plausible to assume that N2 is the
semantic head of the construction, not the interrogative pronoun wat. This
assumption can be further supported by the binding data in (231), in which
coreference is indicated by means of italics.
(231) a. Wie hebben elkaar gebeten?
who have each.other bitten
‘Who bit each other?’
b. *Wat hebben/heeft elkaar gebeten?
what have/has each.other bitten
c. Wat voor honden hebben elkaar gebeten?
what for dogs have each.other bitten
‘What kind of dogs bit each other?’
d. *Wat voor hond heeft elkaar gebeten?
what for dog has each.other bitten
The examples in (231a&b) show that the interrogative pronouns wie ‘who’ and wat
‘what’ differ in that the former can act as the antecedent of the reciprocal pronoun
elkaar ‘each other’, whereas the latter cannot (a difference which may be related to
the fact that wat triggers singular agreement on the finite verb, whereas wie may
trigger either singular or plural agreement; see the discussion under III). The
acceptability of example (231c) therefore suggests that it is N2 that acts as the
antecedent of elkaar; this is confirmed by the unacceptability of example (231d),
where the singular noun hond cannot be the antecedent of elkaar. These facts
support the claim that it is N2 that functions as the semantic head of the wat voor
phrase.