We conclude this discussion of the distribution of heel/hele within the noun phrase with a note on its morphological form. While postdeterminer heel often alternates with geheel, as seen in (310a), the unacceptability of (310b) shows that this does not hold for predeterminer bare heel (but note that the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal lists a variety of examples, all of which sound archaic and/or awkward to us).

Of the four different readings we discerned for postdeterminer heel in Section 21.2.1.2, only the totality reading is readily available for de gehele wereld in (310a), although a purely adjectival interpretation is sometimes also (marginally) available. The latter holds for the fixed collocation geheel getalinteger from the mathematical jargon; that we are dealing with the adjectival reading can be seen from the fact that the collocation can be pluralized, as in gehele getallenintegers, as quantificational geheel is like quantificational heel in that it cannot normally be combined with plural count nouns. We will ignore the more special cases because they are clearly not part of the core grammar.

When we compare the quantificational uses of heel and geheel, it seems that only the semantic core reading of totality is available for geheel; cf. Table (311). We will illustrate the impossibility of degree and negative polarity readings for postdeterminer geheel with reference to the types of examples used in our discussion of the semantics of postdeterminer heel in Section 21.2.1.2.

		de hele taart	de gehele taart
totality	cake in its totality	+	+
degree	quite a cake	+	—
negative polarity	that (blasted) cake ... at all	+	—

For degree-heel, the difference with geheel is best illustrated by the triplet in (204), repeated here in a slightly adapted form as (312), with gehele given as an alternant for heel. We see that only the third intonation contour, corresponding to the adjectival “complete/total” interpretation, is acceptable with geheel; the two degree contours are impossible with geheel.

Accordingly, in examples of the type in (200), repeated as (313) in a slightly revised form, heel does not alternate with geheel because the latter cannot express the “quite” degree reading of these examples.

This restriction on the interpretation of geheel is also responsible for the contrast in (314). The nouns immediately following (ge)hele in this example are quantificational and not referential in nature; cf. Section 18.1.1. Since the nouns are quantificational, degree modification is possible, but they cannot be the target of “totality” quantification because they are non-referential. Consequently, geheel cannot be used.

The (a)-examples in (315) show that the degree-like readings of heel found in the examples in (208) and (213) are also unavailable for geheel. The (b)-examples show that the same is true for the negative polarity reading of heel in (214).

This section has shown that quantificational geheel differs from postdeterminer inflectible heel in that it can only express the quantificational core meaning of the latter, viz. totality. Section 21.2.3 will show that the two forms also differ in their effect on the external syntactic distribution of the noun phrases containing them.