Both fuul ‘much, many’ and n masse ‘a lot’ are used to express a high degree or a high quantity. Some examples are given below:

The examples make it clear that fuul ‘much’ is not a negative polarity item, as it is in West Frisian. Nonetheless. there are contexts in which only one of the two is possible. For example, only fuul ‘much’, not n Masse ‘a lot’, is possible after the function word of excessive degree tou ‘too’.

This may be due to the fact that this function word doesn’t select NPs. The question arises how these items of high degree behave under negation. Anyhow, just as there are high degree markers of the categories DET and NP, there are low degree markers of these two categories: the invariant DET min ‘not much’ and the NP n bitje ‘a little’. Some examples are given below:

In the last two examples, the DET min doesn’t seem to be possible. On the other hand, there are contexts in which only the DET marker of low degree is possible:

It is also interesting to note that both items participate in idiom formation, indicating that the notions quantity and degree belong to subcategorization frames, hence they must be represented as syntactic features which are checked when clauses are constructed. An example is given below:

Here the NP of low degree cannot be replaced by its DET equivalent. Another idiomatic example is given below, which features both low degree items in one phrase:

Here the low degree NP modifies the functional phrase of excessive (negative) degree. Anyhow, min ‘little’ cannot be used to modify any functional phrase of high degree: the NP equivalent must be used. It seems that the NP variant is not found under negation. The basic markers of high and low degree are summerised in the following table.

	NP	DET
High degree	‘n Masse	fuul
Low degree	‘n bitje	min

Comparable to ‘n Masse are the NP quantifiers ‘n Poor and ‘n stuk of wät, except that ‘n Masse is more general. The latter is unspecified for the count / mass distinction, whereas the other two quantifiers are restricted to count nouns, so they may be referred to as count quantifiers of low degree or existential count quantifiers. Oankelde ‘a few’ and enige ‘a few’ are likewise existential count quantifiers.