Basic English Syntax with Exercises

pre-determiner

4.3 Multiple Determiners

Traditionally, the determiner which appears in the middle is called a Central Determiner, the one in front a Pre-determiner and the one following a Post-determiner. One might think that an appropriate analysis for this kind of structure would be as follows:

4.3 Multiple Determiners

This leaves the pre-determiners to accommodate. These are more problematic. However, it turns out that pre-determiners are not such a special class of determiner after all, once one considers the following:

4.3 Multiple Determiners

The only difference between pre-determiners and other determiners is that when they appear in front of a DP the pre-determiner has an optional of whereas this is obligatory with other types of determiner. The fact that we can have a post-determiner in this position is interesting. We have stated that these come in specifier of NP, but where is the NP in (67c) that the post-determiner is in the specifier of? If there is an NP in this structure the head of which cannot be seen, it seems that we are forced to assume that this head is an unpronounced empty category and therefore the structure must be something like the following:

4.3 Multiple Determiners

First, consider the presence of the preposition of which is obligatory in nearly all structures of this type, with the exception of the ‘pre-determiners’. This is the preposition we find when there is a noun which takes a DP complement:

4.3 Multiple Determiners

It seems therefore that the appearance of the meaningless of is a good indication of the presence of a noun or an adjective. In the structure we are considering concerning the pre-determiner, the appearance of the of can be taken as strong evidence in favour of the presence of a noun even though one is not visible.

4.3 Multiple Determiners

Another argument for the existence of the empty noun in pre-determiner constructions comes from their interpretation. Compare the following examples:

4.3 Multiple Determiners

These two constructions are interpreted in very similar ways. (72b) involves a measure or group noun, which we have argued are non-thematic nouns lacking a specification for the F feature. Semantically these work in a very uniform way: the complement of the group noun identifies a set of individuals (in this case the dancers) and the group noun focuses on a part of this set by dividing the set up into natural quantities (groups of individuals, bottles of wine, cups of tea, etc.). This is exactly how the structure with the pre-determiner is interpreted: the set is identified by the inner DP (the dancers) and this set is partitioned into natural quantities (individual dancers in this case) and the pre-determiner quantifies these.

4.3 Multiple Determiners

With pre-determiner structures, the fronting of the of-phrase is also possible:

4.3 Multiple Determiners

As this phenomenon is restricted to structures involving group nouns, it seems that this is strong evidence in favour of the assumption that pre-determiner constructions involve a group noun in the position we have proposed an empty category.

4.3 Multiple Determiners

If this analysis can be maintained, then we can claim that pre-determiners are no different to other determiners (apart from the optionality of of) in that they may introduce a DP that has an NP complement with an empty head: