This subsection briefly discusses the use of pre-determiner bare heel, post-determiner inflectible heel and geheel as independent arguments. The conclusion we may draw from the discussion in the following subsections is that the possibilities for independent uses of these elements are quite limited.

As already pointed out in the discussion of the semantics of heel, purely adjectival heel occurs as a predicate; in example (292a) heel functions as the predicate of a copular construction, and in (292b) as a supplementive. In contexts like these, heel does not alternate with hele or geheel.

One respect in which heel and hele differ robustly from geheel is the fact that heel/hele cannot be construed as a floating quantifier at all. That is, sentences of the type in (293a) are entirely impossible. The grammaticality of (293b), on the other hand, may seem to suggest that geheel can be a floating quantifier, but claims to this effect are immediately refuted by the fact that geheel (in contradistinction to heel/hele) cannot be construed with noun phrases; cf. *geheel dat boek'whole that book'. Rather than functioning as a floating quantifier, geheel in (293b) is an adjunct, replaceable with the PP in zʼn geheel (discussed at the end of Subsection I) or the adverb helemaal. From (293b) we conclude, then, that geheel can occur on its own as an adjunct, and differs in this regard from heel and hele.

The form geheel and the adverb helemaal also show up in a number of other adverbial contexts of a highly idiomatic character. Some examples are given in (294). It is difficult to tell whether geheel/helemaal in (294) are constituents of the noun phrases/PPs with which they combine, or whether they are constituents of the VP or clause in which these expressions occur; the examples in (295) show that topicalizing the noun phrase/PP and pied piping geheel/helemaal is not very felicitous, although stranding geheel/helemaal under topicalization is appreciably worse.

      To conclude this discussion of adverbially construed heel forms, we return to an observation made in the discussion of the semantics of heel in Section 7.2.1. We observed there that adnominal heel sometimes seems to quantify a constituent larger than the noun phrase that it is syntactically construed with, and contributes a semantics which is essentially the same as that of adverbial helemaal. Examples of the type in (296) illustrate this. The interpretation of helemaal in (296c) is that of a VP-level adverb; the semantic contribution of heel and hele in (296a&b) seems to be completely on a par with that of helemaal.

In (297c), on the other hand, helemaal is not interpreted as a VP-level adverb but as a modifier of in de hoek'in the corner'; helemaal in de hoek can be translated as all the way in the corner. Correlated with the fact that helemaal is a PP-modifier rather than a VP-level adverb is the fact that (297c) has no counterparts with adnominal heel/hele: the examples in (297a&b) are entirely unacceptable.

That helemaal and adnominal heel/hele cannot always be used interchangeably can also be shown in the other direction by means of the examples in (298).

      For completeness’ sake note that we analyzed helemaal as a VP-modifier, while allemaal has been analyzed in Section 7.1.5 as a floating quantifier (with scope over the antecedent noun phrase only). There are a number of syntactic and semantic differences between these two elements that justify this difference in analysis. First of all, allemaal can only be used with a plural antecedent, whereas helemaal can be used with both plural and singular count-nouns, as illustrated in example (299).

Second, helemaal readily combines with substance nouns, whereas allemaal seems to give rise to a degraded result in such constructions (although judgments differ; Haeseryn et al. (1997: 350) give (300a) with allemaal as fully acceptable).

These differences can, of course, easily be accounted for: if helemaal has scope over the entire VP, it is unlikely to impose constraints on any noun phrase within that VP, while allemaal obviously does impose constraints on its antecedent. We may therefore conclude that helemaal and allemaal differ both in scope and in meaning. This conclusion leads to the expectation that it should be possible for the two elements to occur in one and the same construction. As shown in example (301a) this expectation is indeed borne out. Note, finally, that the two quantifiers cannot appear in the order given in example (301b), which suggests that helemaal does indeed have scope over the entire VP.