The use of bare count nouns is possible in certain N+V collocations like piano spelento play the piano and paard rijdento ride on horseback. Collocations like these behave like particle verbs such as weggooiento throw away. First, the examples in (121) show that both the bare count noun and the particle must be adjacent to the verb; scrambling leads to severe unacceptability.

The N+V collocation cannot be considered a single word, since verb-second can split the noun and the verb, as it can split the verb and the particle.

Topicalization of the verb, on the other hand, must pied-pipe the bare count noun or particle, as illustrated in (123).

The above examples show that we are dealing with more or less idiomatic expressions that are quite common for all kinds of recurring activities (such as certain domestic duties). It seems that the formation of these collocations is only possible when there is no simple verb to express the activity. For example, while the collocation auto rijdento drive a car is possible, the collocation fiets rijden seems to be blocked by the existence of the verb fietsento cycle. We will return to the N+V collocations discussed above in Section 19.1.5.2, sub I, where we will show that there are reasons to assume that they are structurally ambiguous. A more general discussion of X+V collocations can be found in Section V10.2.

There are also more or less fixed P + N collocations; two examples are given in (123). The expressions are more or less idiomatic in the sense that they are fully compositional; as the English translations show, the PP does not just refer to a location. For a more detailed discussion of prepositions that take bare noun phrases as their complement, see Section P34.1.

The examples in (125a&b) show that while a bare count noun like mesknife cannot be used in argument position, the coordinated phrase mes en vork can. Again, we seem to be dealing with more or less idiomatic constructions, as can be seen from the fact that the relative position of the two conjuncts cannot be changed, as shown in (125c). Finally, example (125d) shows that there are extra-linguistic constraints on the conjuncts: the unacceptability of mes en lepel is clearly related to the Western convention that one uses a knife and a fork at dinner, not a knife and a spoon.

There are many examples of coordinated bare singular count nouns. In (126) some typical examples are given with kinship nouns: we can add vader en moederfather and mother although in this case we may be dealing with vocatives. All these cases seem idiomatic in the sense that the order of the conjuncts is rigid and sometimes the meanings are not compositional: man en vrouw refers to a couple, and moeder en kind typically refers to a mother and her newborn baby.

Other examples involve nouns that refer to objects that are usually used together. A typical example is mes en vorkknife and fork from example (125), but there are many more: a small and random set is given in (127).

Another clearly idiomatic example is dag en nachtday and night in (128), which is rather special in that it is not used as an argument, but as an adverbial phrase meaning something like “continuously for a very long time”.

Note that the conjunction does not have to be enand, but can also be nochneither ... nor. It is clear from the meaning that we are dealing with fixed expressions in (129). We have not been able to find examples with the disjunctive coordinator ofor, which do occur in English; cf. It is feast or famine these days for a working fisherman (Carole Boster, p.c.).

The use of coordinated bare count nouns in prepositional adverbial phrases is very common, as shown in (130). Such constructions often have a high-degree reading; cf. Postma (1995).

Again, the disjunctive coordinator ofor is usually not found, although it should be noted that the fixed collocation op leven en dood in e.g. op leven en dood vechtento fight a life-and-death combat is also realized with of; a Google search (May 26, 2020) yielded about 150 hits for both strings.

Finally, note that none of the examples in this subsection involve conjuncts with a modifier. This is not accidental: adding a modifier to any of the bare nouns above will lead to an unacceptable result.

The previous subsections have shown that bare singular count nouns may occasionally occur in argument position, but that this always has some special effect on the meaning; cf. De Swart (2001) for further discussion. We conclude that we are usually dealing with more or less idiomatic constructions; cf. Zwarts (2008) for a possible counterexample to this claim.